


The Other Tree

by devilsnowcandy



Series: Rewritten [1]
Category: Journey into Mystery, Marvel (Movies), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, Comics/Movie Crossover, Cross-Generational Friendship, Crossover, Derogatory Language, F/M, Family, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Spoilers, Thor: The Dark World, Unrequited Crush, er sure it's a friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-19 13:07:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2389361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilsnowcandy/pseuds/devilsnowcandy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hela decides to rewrite her own history, and by definition Loki's as well.  In new and dangerous worlds, Loki and Leah (and Leah) have to deal with marauders, not-quite-SHIELD agents, dark elves, dangerous and powerful ancient and not-so-ancient artefacts, and familiar (ish) friends and foes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a crossover between comics canon and movie canon, not a fusion. Rating is for MCU Loki's foul mouth, mostly.
> 
> Art for this work (none as yet for this chapter) is by thusspakekate.
> 
> Also, thanks to cinclidae for help with plot-bouncing and brainstorming.

Who was Leah, really? The left hand of Hela, who was the thought of Loki – at least to begin with.

The Queen of Hel sat alone, gazing at nothing, waiting patiently for what she knew was due to come. 

She was not as deeply connected to the intricacies of the universe as some, not given to concerning herself overmuch with affairs unrelated to the dead in her care, yet she was a goddess, and more ancient than most. She understood the fabric of story better than many. 

The Yggdrasil rising from Broxton, that connected all the nine realms together, was but one in an intangible forest. Every so often one tree would bend closer to another, as if moved by a cosmic wind. Depending on how one positioned oneself, it was possible to reach over – or to call over – in such a case from one tree to the branch of another…

_What will be, will be,_ she was thinking. Soon, perhaps mere hours from now, Loki would come to her with the pen-born imitation of his dearest friend, and request that she send her far away. Hela would comply, so that things could happen as they were meant to. It was foretold, and in a way was in the past already.

But gods do not have history. They have story.

_What will be, will be,_ but what will be can change. All this she was thinking, as she reached for a small, wickedly sharp knife.

And who was Leah? The blood of Hela, let drip onto the branch of a neighbouring world tree in answer to a mother’s call.

 

**Asgard**  
“How strange. Here I was led to believe I was never to see you again! Can the All-Father’s watch on his wife be slipping?”

Frigga’s illusion, carefully crafted as always, stood in the centre of the cell. Even here she was regal, queenly as he remembered, though her voice, when she spoke, mimicked his lightness. “Some orders are made to be circumvented.” 

It seemed such an easy opening that Loki hesitated to take it, and she leapt into the empty space. “Are you comfortable? Do you need reading material? I know how your mind gets with boredom…”

He gave a half-hearted sneer. “Do you indeed? Your confidence in your knowledge of me is, I think, misplaced.”

He regretted the words as soon as he said them, for the effect of them he saw reflected in her face. He looked away from her to resist the impulse to apologize.

“Perhaps,” she said quietly, and that stung a little. “Perhaps not.”

He said nothing in response, not wishing to continue on that vein, and out of the corner of his eye he saw her simulacrum disappear in a flare of green. 

He told himself it was what he wanted, and began slowly pacing. The other prisoners were staring at him from their own cells – the one-time King of Asgard brought down to the level of a common criminal was a great sensation. If Odin’s dungeons weren’t inaccessible to the public he was sure flocks of civilians would have come to gawk at him.

And it was on the next turn around his cell that he saw her, a slender, green-clothed figure glimpsed from the corner of his eye. A gawker, in the flesh? Some chit of a girl who’d snuck past the guards, perhaps.

He halted his pacing and turned his full attention on her, a little smirk playing about his lips. Let her stare in awe, then, at the monster caged. “Enjoying the view?”

She stood mere paces from his cell, her gaze cool and unimpressed. She was quite pale and quite short, her hair partially drawn back and decorated with tiny white pins, her dress skirt and sleeves both long and immaculate. She looked quite out of place in the dank halls of Asgard’s dungeons.

The guards, pacing as ever between the rows of cells, seemed to take no notice of her.

When she made no reply, Loki approached the window, smirk still playing on his lips. “Where’d you spring from, little weed? I think this is no place for such as you.”

“You think many things, Loki, and never rightly.” Her voice was scornful for a child addressing the one-time King, but from such a small, slight figure, it inspired more amusement than anger in him.

“And you’re a right little bitch. What favours did you pay the guards to gain such unhindered access here?”

If she took his implication it didn’t faze her. “Not enough, that they didn’t spare me the sight of your face and sound of your voice.”

He considered making a more explicit innuendo, just to see if she would react, but she turned away abruptly and then did something rather unexpected. She disappeared, as quickly and smoothly as if she’d never been there at all.

Loki flicked his gaze around the dungeon, automatically searching for her reappearance. He’d been about her age when he first mastered the art of hiding himself from sight for short periods of time, though it had taken him a good bit longer to be able to do it so seamlessly, and he’d once delighted in disappearing before his brother only to reappear moments later just out of reach.

His wandering gaze caught that of a prisoner in a cell across the passage. Loki smiled brightly at him, and he quickly looked away, muttering to his cell-mates.

The girl did not reappear. Loki stared out over the prison, the cheery malevolence on his face disappearing as he was reminded of the baseness of his fellow inmates, the unworthiness of the guards that watched him uneasily from the corners of their eyes. At last he turned his gaze away from the ensorcelled window, annoyed.

Another glimmer of green caught his eye, this time within his cell. 

It was not the girl. In the far corner, a small pile of books had appeared. 

 

It took more effort to be seen than not to be. That was one of the first things Leah had noticed – among the others was the fact that she no longer stood before the Holy Grail, and was not the insensate hand of Hela. She stepped quickly through the dungeon, soundless. The guards, oblivious, paid her no heed as she slipped through the doors – literally through, as it seemed pointless to become corporeal enough to have to push them open. 

This was Asgard. Not as it had been of old, she felt, but also certainly not the Asgardia she’d observed from a distance in a cave near Broxton, Oklahoma. She had no way of knowing how much time had passed since that positively sentimental goodbye next to the Holy Grail, but she was also certain that the Loki she’d known could never have become that twisted, bitter brat of a man in the cell.

So. Her mistress had permitted her to live once more, but differently than once she had, and far away from any world or people she’d known. The realization should have distressed her, but Leah was Leah, and relatively implacable when considering her own fate. Right now she was better served than she would have been, as a nonentity, and that would have to be enough.

The halls she passed through had little traffic, and as she had no particular goal in mind – and it was very strange, this wandering purposelessness – she took her time ambling through them, gazing about at the glory of Asgard.

She gradually became aware of a pull inside her, faint but insistent. If Leah were not who she was, she may have felt wistful at the loss of the freedom she’d seemed to have only moments before, or perhaps eagerness at the prospect of some new purpose in existence. But Leah was Leah, and so it was with some faint curiosity only that she heeded the call.

 

Thor was on his way to the stables when Frigga found him.

“Leaving again?”

Once, the tone she was using would have made Thor halt and guiltily deny whatever action he was being asked about. Now, he only paused to give a reply.

“The marauders on Vanaheim have yet to be quelled, mother. My work is not done.”

“And nor will it ever be.” But she smiled as she said it, her heart overcome with fondness. To speak with Thor and see how he had matured into such a fine, worthy man gave her strength. 

He returned the smile. “This task at least may be soon.” He gave her a shallow bow and was on his way again. She stood a moment in the corridor, looking after him. He had always delighted in seeking battle, but it was different now, more tempered by a sense of duty. And afterwards, more often than not, he sought the counsel of Heimdall rather than carouse about with his friends. He was so different now from what he’d been. 

Her other son, too, was different now, and in not so nearly a pleasant way. It seemed as if Thor had come to embrace all the better qualities of his character, while Loki had chased after the worse of his own. That his behaviour was recognizably his made it all the more painful to handle, but also gave her hope – if he was still himself, she believed she could still reach him.

It was then that she felt it, the flickering sense of some unexpected magical presence. She betrayed no reaction, only turning easily to begin her way back to her own rooms. She concentrated as she went, searching out the presence, hoping to identify its source. She briefly considered, and dismissed, Loki – he may have become a more accomplished sorcerer than her in some ways, but he would never have any magic subtle enough to escape the wards of his cell.

The presence had a strange flavour to it. Otherworldly, almost, but also familiar. It did make her think of Loki – in her sight that was not sight, there was a sparking, greenish quality to the presence that she’d always associated with his workings, yet it was also dark and cool, muted, and that was also somehow familiar, though distantly. There was no malice to it that she could detect.

It seemed too organic to be a sending – the sort of magical construct she’d used to speak with Loki in his cell – but neither did it seem quite its own being.

Frigga entered her private chamber, still considering it, and decided on a course of action.

“There are no observers here,” she said, turning to the closed door as she spoke. “You may introduce yourself if you wish.” 

A moment passed, and then where there had been only the ornately carved door there was suddenly a girl clad in green standing before it.

It was not, somehow, what Frigga had expected. But she kept her face as it was, regal and imposing, her eyebrows slightly raised in expectance.

“I am Leah,” said the girl. She said it in such a way that it seemed to need another phrase at the end, some statement of title or land, but she left it at that.

“I am Frigga, Queen of Asgard.”

“Well met, Queen of Asgard,” said Leah, her voice and bearing all perfectly polite and respectful. But there was something to her words that put Frigga in mind of Loki as a child, mocking foreign dignitaries without their knowledge with a little something, a tiny smirk or even just the sudden, brief lowering of eyelids.

Frigga smiled, still regal. “Well met, Leah. You will not be offended, I trust, if I ask what manner of being you are, and what brings you to my home?”

“I will not,” said Leah, but offered no information on either matter.

Again, Frigga thought of Loki as a child. She added a little sharpness to her voice. “Then consider yourself asked.”

The girl did not seem perturbed. “I know not what manner of being I am now, though I was once a hand maiden.” She paused. “I had thought myself without mistress, but I seem bound to you.” 

“How so?” The question was more pointed than Frigga had meant it, but the girl’s words were surprising and a little unsettling.

“I felt a pull within that drew me to you.”

Frigga looked Leah over with a critical eye, probing at the same time with her magic. She seemed, to all appearances, a child, one perhaps growing a little bored, but remaining dutifully attendant. In a magical sense she seemed distinctly alien to her surroundings. There was something discordant about her, a jarring jumble of magical construct and being of her own. There was no answering pull to the one Leah spoke of, not the sort of binding between working and caster, or working and intended master. But there was indeed something, a thread of connection and strange familiarity. 

A queen cannot appear flummoxed, even when she is. Frigga relaxed her expression to one a bit warmer, and asked in a gentler, inquiring voice, “Where and to whom did you serve as handmaid?”

It did not seem to have an effect on Leah. Her inflection was the same as before as she replied, “I was the hand maiden of the Queen of Hel.”

Frigga’s breath caught in her throat. The girl hailed from Helheim! She stepped forward, raising a hand to firmly grasp the girl’s chin and raise it so that she might look into her clear, green eyes. Leah jerked, startled, but did not pull or glance away.

“If you should be lying to me…” said the Queen of Asgard, her voice low and heavy with a threat she did not voice. 

Leah only stared back, her eyes moving minutely to take in Frigga’s suddenly intense gaze. Like this, in a moment of unprepared shock, she seemed more a person and a child than she had before. Frigga could detect no lie in those eyes, nothing but honest surprise. She’d been successfully lied to before, many times, but only by the most accomplished liar in the Nine Realms, and even he had been to some extent decipherable at the age this girl seemed to be.

Still staring into those eyes, Frigga said, less threateningly, “How did you come to leave her service?”

Leah did not blink, but she hesitated a brief moment, and her voice, when she spoke, was less even than it had been before. “She… a debt was paid. I was no longer necessary.”

_A debt paid_. 

After a long moment, Frigga released the girl, stepping back to give them both a little space. 

Helheim, as all Asgardians knew, was the place in which resided those dead of infirmity or age, or anything but the rage of battle. Both a more accepting and more subdued sanctuary than the vast, merry halls of Valhalla, reserved for the glorious battle dead, it took in all souls who could not attain such an end. Even babes, dying slowly of exposure. They said it was ruled by a cold, cruel women, who took all who came to her because she was ever greedy for more souls in her barren land.

Frigga knew the woman was no myth, though her nature was not so easy to decipher. She had always seemed, to Frigga, to have a strange, dry, dangerous humour to her, and she was ancient, more ancient than anyone knew, and had a long, long memory to match.

And Odin and Frigga both had once stolen from her something she’d had reason to think to claim as her own.

Frigga kept her voice calm as she said, without question, “When you came to Asgard, you did not come first to me.” 

She expected, almost, a non-answer to her non-question. But Leah, a little wariness in her gaze, said “I arrived in the dungeons far beneath, standing before Loki.”

Frigga sighed. “Yet to him you felt no pull.”

“I did not.”

Frigga wanted to step away, to send the girl away and sit heavily before the hearth, head in hands. But she only clasped her hands to together and allowed herself a tiny frown as she thought. 

The girl must be some shade, part magical construct, part her own being, a more sophisticated creature than one born of natural means, that the Queen of Hel saw fit to send as teasing reminder of what she’d long felt was her due. Well, it had long been a practise to send the girls of one realm to train as handmaids beneath the queen of another. It would fit what Frigga knew of Hel’s ruler for this to be a mockery of that. Even but a few years before, Frigga would not have feared the consequences of speaking to Odin, who was one of very few capable of challenging her – when she had come in person before, seeking to cajole him into giving up his temple-found second son, Odin had refused. But Loki had twice now suffered a fate that should have killed him, and however he’d escaped the second, Hel’s desire now must be even stronger – and Odin’s interests in his wellbeing far less than before.

Frigga would have to tend to this herself.

“Leah,” said Frigga, raising her eyes to Hel’s maiden. “You claim to be bound to me, so I will see that you carry out my will.”

The girl could indeed have been lying about that, but Frigga did not think she had. The connection, though not the established bond of sorcerer over construct, did give her some amount of authority. And there were spells she could and would cast to ensure some security. Only days ago, Frigga had wished to herself that she could have something, someone to help her reach her youngest son again, and here an opportunity presented itself. Hel’s gift would be used to the utmost.

“You will take yourself from my presence, and remain at Loki’s side, to watch over him and keep him from harm.” She looked to the fire as she said this, so she did not see the brief, exasperated expression that crossed Leah’s face, gone when Frigga turned to her again. “Do this for me, and I will set you free.”

She felt some pity for the girl, but Leah’s face betrayed only a little surprise, no joy at the prospect. She sighed, then inclined her head and touched her skirts, the barest approximation of a curtsy, before she disappeared without another word.

 

**Hel (616)**

Hela had ample time to bind her hand before her expected guests arrived. She could have sought to hide it, if she wished, but she knew from memory that neither child would be paying much attention to her.

She heard the rumble of Garm’s voice from outside, and she flicked her eyes to the entrance. She did not need to hear the rest to know what passed – these moments, so far away in memory, remained nonetheless among the clearest for her. Leah’s confused response to Garm, Loki’s words to Brun at the door, Leah’s reaction…

Hela raised her chin, cutting into Leah’s demands for an explanation of his actions. “Ah, Loki. At last.”

He looked to her, his face set and serious. “Leah needs to be sent away, Hela. A long way away from here. I don’t want to have anything to do with her.”

“What?!” shouted Leah. Hela did not even glance at her, not needing the reminder of the shocking hurt and confusion the words had caused. 

“I concur,” said Hela, and then, breaking with the memory, “Yet I have done you many favours, Loki, and you have yet to repay most. I see no reason to serve your interests again.”

He stared at her, his face slack. He had not even considered the possibility that she would not facilitate him. Typical.

“They would be also in yours…” he began, uncertain.

Leah grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him. “Are you possessed? Speak to me! At least try to convince me to leave, don’t just demand it over me!” 

He would not even look at her, turning his face fully away with his mouth miserably set.

Hela stood. “Enough, little liar. I think I know better for myself what will best suit my interests.” She reached in her mind to the other world tree, raising her hand to form a portal.

“Loki of Asgard,” she intoned, “I send you away, to be gone from this realm forevermore, never to trouble us again.”

He barely had time to yelp, trying to twist away, as the portal pulled him in. Leah tried to reach out after him, shouting, and turned puzzled eyes on Hela. “Why – ?”

“Leah of Hel,” said Hela, “You shall go as well.”

She did not even have time to cry out as the portal pulled her away.

 

**Vanaheim**

The portal was a little like Leah’s always were: fast, accurate, feeling vaguely green-ish magically speaking. Loki was wrenched out into brightness, sunlight falling through leaves. He stumbled as he arrived, tripping over a root to fall against the trunk of the tree. 

He stayed there, sprawled on the ground, for several long moments. 

He had half expected Brun to refuse his request – he’d mostly gone to her to avoid speaking to Leah – but, despite having no real reason to expect Hela’s acquiescence, he’d gone to her without any other hope for Leah. The refusal alone had been jarring enough, but the rest…

He rolled over onto his back, gazing up at the canopy. The crushing dread had not left him. By tomorrow, Mephisto would take the throne of Satan and destroy millions of people. The heroes of all Nine Realms would respond, and maybe triumph against him (they usually did, in the end), but it would not help those for whom it was too late. 

Unless Loki went to the space beneath the question mark and allowed Ikol to destroy him, which had been the awful plan he’d been working toward when he went to Hela. But Asgardia’s great libraries, with the room hidden within the book, were out of reach now. He closed his eyes, wondering if he could reach it through his mind alone. Ikol was, after all, his other self, and had been with him all along. 

But there was no subtle opening of doors, no sudden long fall into the hidden room. There was only the back of his eyelids, no matter how he strained in trying to recall the twisting, magical path to it.

Was the room necessary? He opened his eyes again and glanced around, taking in a little more of his surroundings. A ferny forest floor, tall trees, faraway flashes in the blue sky above him. No magpies. 

He crawled to his feet, looking around carefully. Still no magpies, or birds or beasts of any kind. Only the whisper of wind through the leaves, and far away, muted thuds that he could not quite identify at the moment. 

“Ikol,” he said, his voice a whisper. 

There was no flutter of wings or irritated squawk. He tried again. “Ikol, I am ready now.” 

He was lying. He was not ready to sacrifice himself to himself. He had wanted desperately to speak to Thor before the end, had saved up the last conversation just for him, but of course Thor was not here, and if he went now he would go without that. He waited long, aching moments, steeling himself for readiness.

But there was no response. In fact, Loki felt entirely alone, distant thudding noises notwithstanding. Since he had first uncovered the riddle that led him to Ikol, the bird that was not a bird had been a constant presence – sometimes forgotten in the presence of others, sometimes silent and formless, but always _there_ , or ready to be there, as Ikol his evil other self. Now he was not, more so even than he’d been ‘not there’ when Daimon Hellstrom came to tell Leah and Loki of Mephisto.

There was another thud, much closer, and this sounded closer to a boom. At the same time, he registered the sounds of shouting and clanging steel, the humming of weaponry. A battle somewhere, and coming closer from the sounds of it.

Loki hunkered down, searching for a hiding spot, and tried reflexively to perform the bit of magic that would bring his crossbow and arrows to hand from the little pocket dimension he stored them in. But it felt as though he was reaching across an impossibly vast distance, stretching himself past bearing, and he stopped quickly before he strained himself.

There was a nearby crash and a flare of red from an exploding projectile in a tree some metres to his left. He flinched and backed away. Whatever else was to be done, he couldn't stay here.

A glint of light, shining from beneath a fern, caught his eye, and even aware of the potential danger headed his way he could not resist bending to pick up… a strange, grotesque crown, emanating a sickening, dreadful energy and decorated with the screaming faces of a child in horrible fear or pain.

His face, in fact.

It was the Fear Crown.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art by thusspakekate.

**Vanaheim**

There was no time to contemplate the implications of the Fear Crown being here. Loki stuffed it quickly into a pocket on the inside of his tunic and was off, darting away through the trees. He had no clear goal in mind, only to get away from the battle and keep the crown with him at all costs.

The problem, he realized shortly, was that he could not tell quite where ‘away from the battle’ was. He’d thought he was running away, but the sounds echoed from before him as well, now, and between the trees ahead he could see dangerous looking armoured figures. He risked a quick glance behind him – more frightening figures, some mounted, some not, coming closer at an alarming rate.

Eyes front once more. A creature with the body of a human and the head and horns of a bald-faced bull charged sneeringly toward him – he yelped and darted quickly to the side, avoiding the crash of its mace.

Really, he was quite obviously a child. One might expect that should mean something!

He was not alone in his flight. Around him, interspersed with and cowering from the frighteningly armoured figures, were people in long flowing clothes, shouting and crying out in fear. And there were other warriors, in brighter armour, who came forward to clash with the marauders.

The problem with being on a battlefield, and in particular running away from one, was that it was very difficult to get a clear picture of what was happening and he feared stopping to get a better one than his blurry snapshot. He dodged around everyone who came into his path, which was leading vaguely toward the edge of the trees – until he reached the embankment that was their edge and nearly tumbled down it.

He grabbed a tree to stop himself, taking precious moments to view the grounds before him. It looked like it was ordinarily a city or settlement of some sort, but now it was a battleground. He noted the differences – the mainly uniform armour and weaponry of the one group, the disorganized, haphazard collection of tools and armour of the other. The screaming civilians fleeing from the latter to behind the former.

Alright, so he had the good guys and bad guys figured out. That was always an important step.

But Loki had spent too long looking – the omnipresent noise of clashing weapons and explosions, screams and shouts meant he didn’t register the sound of the being approaching him until almost the last second. He jerked away as a tall, fearsome creature, clad entirely in feature-obscuring armour, reached out for his arm with one gauntleted hand. 

Then he really did fall down the embankment, tucking himself into a tight roll with his arms pressed tight to his chest to keep the crown safe, and yelling at the top of his lungs to attract the attention of the nearest group of apparently benevolent bright-armoured troops. He was dizzy by the time he tried to stand, but he stumbled off at a run anyway, ducking around a strange, low-roofed building – and nearly straight onto a double bladed sword.

Its wielder pulled it away from him before he could do himself injury. 

“Watch yourself!” shouted a woman’s voice, and then, “Down!”

He fell hastily to the ground as she whipped her blade around to slash at whatever had been behind him. There was a collection of ceramic pots and baskets a little to the left, making a small line out from the building – not exactly perfect cover, but it was something. He wiggled his way toward it and turned to view his savior.

It was her hair he first noticed, dark, loose to her shoulders. It was the same colour as Sif’s. She spun and thrust her blade, power and grace in each movement, gaze fierce as she fought off one foe after another, and he thought again _Sif/_ but her armour was wrong, and her features…

She turned briefly between opponents, glancing to see where he’d crawled off to, and there _was_ something reminiscent of Sif to them, in the intensity of her eyes, the set of her chin. But they were ultimately different.

He raised a dusty hand to waggle a wave at her, trying a smile, and she nodded curtly and looked away, already engaging with another fighter.

Loki sat back against the short side of the building, keeping alert to the surrounding battle even as it seemed not to touch him. Alright. The good guy shiny-armoured ones seemed to be out of their depth at the moment, but their overall discipline would likely give them the advantage in the long run. It was already established that at least one of them was willing to accept him as a defendable innocent, even though from what he could see he didn’t resemble the civilian residents of this place at all. Stay or flee once more? He almost wished, perversely, that he could have Ikol to bounce ideas off.

If he could remain free of any really grievous harm or capture until the end of this…

There was a sudden explosion of noise behind him and he twisted around, cowering, as the sky opened up into a multicoloured beam of light directed at the ground.

From the beam came a hammer, smashing into a line of marauders before returning like a Midgardian boomerang to the hand of the golden-haired, red-cloaked, shining figure emerging from the light.

_Thor._

For it was him, it had to be, there was no one else in Nine Realms who wielded Mjolnir like that, who came to battle with that little grin and exuberance, who exuded such inexplicable, perfect Thor-ness. He raised his hammer and smashed it to the ground, felling a hundred foes with the crackling earth, and Loki, forgetting the danger and uncertainty, leapt up with a wide smile on his face. 

“Thor!” he shouted. He’d worried he wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye – now he would not be saying goodbye at all!

Thor and the lady warrior’s heads both turned to him as he began a mindless scrabble toward them. Pointless, stupid in the midst of battle, but if anything could solve every problem of this horrible, confusing day it would be Thor’s heavy arms around him.

The woman shouted a warning and blocked an arrow with her shield, and both she and Thor whirled around, away from Loki, to carry on with the battle.

Loki stopped. Thor had heard him, had seen him, he knew he had, yet there’d been no wave or shout of greeting. Nothing. And his face, when it was turned to him, was different in many subtle ways from how Loki remembered it. But this was undeniably Thor, Loki _knew_ it was…

“Ho! Wrong spot for little ones,” came a cheerful voice as a gloved and armoured arm wrapped around his waist. Loki squirmed, but not desperately, as he was fairly certain he was held by a benevolent side member. “Oof, rather heavy for a little one,” added the voice, strained, as the arm sought to lift him.

“I’m sorry!” yelped Loki, deciding the pitiful lost orphan was the best possible option in this scenario. “Is there a safe place? I can go there myself, please just tell me! I’m very lost and scared.”

“Not to worry,” said the voice. Loki twisted his neck to see – blond hair, styled blond beard, a clothing style and weapon of choice reminiscent of a particular legendary outlaw in Midgardian mythology…

_Fandral,_ he thought, but Fandral had never addressed him with such abstract kindness. The man ducked sharply to the side suddenly, pulling Loki with him, as an arrow shot past. 

“We have it all under control,” he continued, “But we can control it _best_ if little lost children stay _out_ of the way, down and safe, hum?” He flashed a smile at Loki as he shoved him into a small crater in the ground and went back to the fight. He’d brought Loki behind a small line of the shining warriors, who seemed to be holding their ground better than they’d been before.

Loki cowered further into the crater, partly because he was actually scared but mostly because apparently being a frightened little boy was working wonders in his favour with these people. Inwardly, his mind was working desperately. That _was_ Thor out there, he was certain of it. The features may have differed, and he may not recall Loki, but there was something ineffably Thor-ish that could not be copied. The others – Sif and Fandral – did not have the same force of personality, but if Thor was Thor he was beginning to think they must also be Sif and Fandral indeed, and not just strangely, coincidentally similar to them.

There was a lull in the fighting, followed by excited clamouring, and he tentatively raised his head to look. A bunch of the marauders were massing into a circle, like a bunch of Midgardian children about to watch a fight on the schoolyard, as some possibly somewhat dated books had led him to understand was common. 

The soldiers who’d been before him had broken formation to get a better look, and he, hesitant, crept out of the crater as well. Everyone seemed transfixed by the giant rock monster approaching.

Whatever exchange occurred was mostly blocked from his view by other, much larger bodies, but Loki knew it was Thor by the laughter given in response. He folded his arms over his chest, pressing them nervously against the crown in his pocket. Thor and Sif and Fandral – Asgardians come to defend civilians against an outside threat. He’d been peripherally aware of the existence of other universes and dimensions, and of the possibility of travel between them. He had never thought of Hela facilitating such travel, bound up with the Asgardian dead as she was, but he supposed that if he were to suspect any Asgardian god besides perhaps Odin to be capable of it, it would be her. 

He would have to puzzle out the reasons for her doing so at some other time – Thor had destroyed the rock beast and this seemed to result in the majority of his and the other Asgardians’ opponents laying down their arms in surrender. 

If Loki was to get Thor’s attention, he would have to act now.

 

It had been a long day, even spent as it was in glorious battle. Sif, like many Asgardian warriors, took great satisfaction and even joy in triumphing in true combat against her foes. But as the vagabonds and marauders who had laid such waste to beautiful Vanaheim surrendered their weapons and submitted to capture by the Asgardians, Sif found herself less than perfectly at ease. She had been so certain that she and the Warriors Three were all that was needed to command the forces here, but they had underestimated their opponents – and they had indeed needed Thor’s presence to switch the tide of the battle.

Sif allowed her gaze to venture only briefly over to where he was having quiet words with Hogun. The failure itself was embarrassing, and that she’d tried to deny it was worse, but Thor had only gently teased her for it, once, while in the midst of battle. Once he would have been more obnoxious about it, rubbed it in with more mockery, still not nastily meant but grating nonetheless. Now he had let it go already. 

She was, if she were to be honest with herself, still not entirely sure if she preferred this new, more mature version of Thor. In some ways it was almost better when he was so irritatingly immature, if only because then she didn’t – 

“Er – excuse me, coming through, thank you – ulp!”

A bright, youthful voice cut through her thoughts, and she turned quickly to see that one of the Einherjar had caught hold of a child by the back of his tunic. He was facing Hogun and Thor, and his arms windmilled as the soldier pulled him back. Sif, watching, was unsurprised to see it was the same strangely-dressed child she’d noticed earlier in the battle, once when he’d nearly impaled himself on her sword, and once when he’d run up and called out while she and Thor fought together. She looked on a moment as he held out his hands to his captor, all apologetic and concerned.

There was something about him…

She had, ostensibly, been assisting the Einherjar in their removal of weapons from the marauders and sorting of them into prison groups. But the soldiers had it well under control, and she was, as a personal companion to the heir to the throne, under no one’s authority but his and that of the All-Father and Frigga. She walked over to the two.

The boy saw her first, over the Einherjar’s shoulder, and his eyes widened as he did.

Sif eyed him, but addressed her question to the Einherjar. “What seems to be the problem?”

He fingered the shaft of his spear uncertainly. “This child,” he began, but the boy, whom he’d released, dashed around him and nearly flung himself at Sif. She stepped back in alarm.

“Oh, please!” he cried, kneeling in the dirt, “I am all alone, my family gone, and I would be too if not for you Asgardians! I only wanted to thank you.”

Sif inclined her head briefly to the frowning soldier, indicating she would handle this, and met the boy’s imploring gaze through his bangs. 

She leaned down so that her face was level with his when she spoke, ignoring the ache in her legs. “Your gratitude is appreciated. We can only wish we’d come soon enough to save your family.” 

Inwardly she winced. It had been her damn pride that had prevented them from calling for Thor’s aid earlier, her desire to not have to rely on the prestige of the All-Father’s son and greatest warrior of Asgard to turn the tide of battle. If the child spoke truly, his loss had her in part to blame.

_If_ he spoke truly. She was a little surprised to realize she did not entirely believe that he did. Perhaps it was that he was so different in appearance and garb than the Vanir here, so blatantly out of place.

Or perhaps it was that he shrugged in response, saying “I’ve heard it said that if wishes were fishes, the poor would eat like kings. What’s happened cannot be changed.”

She straightened up, wary again. “Where does your family lie?” she asked. “I will help you lay them to rest.”

“Oh,” said the boy, rising unsteadily to his feet, “I did not mean – it was not these brutes that murdered them, and not so recent, but a sickness… I am not from these parts, you see.”

She raised her eyebrows, and he tugged nervously on the fingers of his gloves before he rushed on. “I am – I have always admired you Asgardians. My parents told me stories of you when I was small, and I wished always to be like you. When they died I thought… perhaps I could find my way to Asgard, and live there among you. I was trying to find a way to get there when these… people attacked.”

He glanced nervously up at her, and added, “You see, I’ve even tried to – to imitate your dress. Er.” He looked down at himself. “With mixed results. I’m sure with more practise I can fit in better!”

Sif stared at him a long moment. She found she was not particularly convinced by his story, but there was an earnestness to his desperation that she thought was not faked.

“The Bifrost was broken, and has been only recently repaired,” she said. His mouth formed a little ‘oh’ of surprise. Genuine?

She sighed and looked away. Children were somewhat out of her realm of expertise. Sif could hardly read even the most straightforward child, and this one was hardly that. She cast about for Volstagg and, spotting him with Fandral, waved across to him. His children were all younger than this one, that she could remember, but he at least had something of a frame of reference. 

“It is not for me to approve or reject your request,” she said to the child, who was looking curiously to whom she was waving at.

“Really? You seemed so very authoritative…” he said, and she looked sharply at him, but his face was quite earnest again. “Would… should I speak to Thor?”

He spoke with a sort of subdued eagerness, like he wanted very badly for her to say yes but was trying to hide it. She remembered how he had called out Thor’s name during the battle. “What do you know of Thor?” she asked.

The boy fidgeted. “He – only that he’s the greatest hero of the Nine Realms, the shining, favoured son of the All-Father. I’ve always wanted to meet him.” There was, as best she could judge, genuine admiration and longing in his voice as he spoke.

“Perhaps you will,” she told him, “But it is not for him to decide on entry to Asgard, either.”

“Then – that fellow?” The boy pointed as Volstagg approached.

“No.”

“… then why – ?”

“Lady Sif!” called Volstagg. “I see you taking your ease while we toil away at those duties always present at the close of battle. Not such a change from the usual chain of events, in any case…”

He chuckled a little, his gaze settling with some curiosity on the boy beside her.

“I hope you’re not counting yourself among those toiling away,” she retorted easily, “unless you mean to count finding yourself spoils and rewards a form of toil.” 

Volstagg shrugged his massive shoulders, and knelt down before the boy. “Hello little one. I saw you in the battle. Very quick and nimble! But very dangerous to be about in war, nonetheless. What is your name?”

The boy had drawn back a little, wide-eyed, as he leaned down. “Serrure,” he said. “I’m called Serrure.”

Sif’s face twitched in consternation, hopefully unseen by either of them. She should have thought to ask that.

“And I am Volstagg, the voluminous!” He stood and held out his hand for the boy to shake, which he took after only a moment’s hesitation. “Good! And now we are all met. What is it you need?” This Volstagg said while looking to Sif, but before she could speak the boy – Serrure – answered him.

“Passage to Asgard! If at all possible.”

Volstagg gave him a surprised look. “Passage to Asgard! And why is that?”

“He says his family is all gone,” said Sif, cutting in, hoping that the look she gave Volstagg was significant enough he would understand the import of her saying _he says_ , “and that he has always wished to be Asgardian anyway.” 

Volstagg stroked his beard, thinking. “I think that’s out of my range of authority…”

“Yes,” said Sif, and then, because she could not think of a more subtle way to do it, took his arm and asked the child to excuse them for a few moments. He looked after them curiously as Sif drew Volstagg away a short distance.

“Something about him does not sit right with me. But I don’t know children as you do. How does he seem?”

“The request is odd,” said Volstagg, not even bothering to pretend he was not watching the boy, “but I notice nothing amiss.”

“He seems a child?” she pressed, still in a hushed voice. “A true one? Not some strange… facsimile, hoping to do harm?”

Volstagg looked around at her, clearly surprised. “Is such a thing even possible?”

She shrugged, impatient. “I don’t know. I’ve never known much of magic.” None of them had. They’d always relied on Loki to provide expert input in that regard. From Volstagg’s wince she could see he was thinking the same thing. “But he seems… off.”

“He seems a true enough child to me,” said Volstagg. “Perhaps he is not being entirely truthful, but children often hide things from their elders. Especially when they do not know them.” 

That, from Sif’s recollection of her own long-ago experiences of childhood, rang true. But it was more than a simple distrust, she felt – there was something about the boy that tickled at familiarity, and not in a good way. It was not something she could easily explain, so she only shook her head and turned away to see that Serrure was no longer observing her and Volstagg, but had had his attention caught by the approaching figure of Thor. 

“What do you here?” called Thor, smiling genially at Sif, appearing not to notice the almost hungry gaze the child was directing at him. 

She nodded curtly back. “We have a request, from a local citizen.” She gestured to the boy, and Thor stopped before him, looking at him with interest.

Sif had expected Serrure to jump into his explanation immediately, faced now as he was with his apparent idol. But he said nothing, only looked up at Thor with that hopeful, searching look. So Sif said, “This boy is without family or home and wishes to be brought to Asgard.” 

Thor’s smile became gentle, and he laid a hand on Serrure’s thin shoulder. “I am sorry to hear of your loss,” he said, and Serrure looked away, nearly trembling under his touch.

“… thank you,” he said in a subdued voice. “I – I know you are not the arbiter of Asgard’s immigration policies, but I had hoped… perhaps you could put in a word? You fought so very bravely. All of you! I am already entirely in your debt.” He ducked his head, as if embarrassed.

Thor looked at him a long moment, his face becoming serious and thoughtful. Sif shifted, uncomfortable. She had just realized who the boy reminded her of – Loki, when he was young, had blended just the same degree of apparently genuine feeling with the vague air of a hidden agenda. He even had vaguely similar features. 

“Do not consider yourself indebted to us,” said Thor at last. “At least not for this. Vanheim lies under Asgard’s protection, and you lost the benefit of it through my doing. Our efforts here are as much to atone for that as anything else.”

He took his hand from Serrure’s shoulder, breaking their shared gaze. “This request, to come to the safety of Asgard, I will address to the All-Father himself. I think he may see the wisdom of it.”

Sif was watching Serrure’s face quite closely, so she could see the honest relief that blossomed across it. It was mostly that which prevented her from shaking her head in warning at Thor when he looked to her – uneasy as the child made her, he was a child, and afraid. Odin was probably more than capable of dealing with whatever else he may be.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a reference in this chapter to a detail of the MCU revealed in Guardians of the Galaxy, though it's not exactly a spoiler.
> 
> There is some confusion in the comics over the names of Volstagg's daughter and wife, because depending on the issue sometimes the daughter is Hilde while the wife is Gudrun and sometimes it's the other way around. I've decided to use Hilde for the daughter's name and Gudrun for the wife's in this fic.

**Asgard’s dungeons**

The girl was there again. Loki registered her presence but did not immediately react to it, instead continuing to pace his cell. If she wanted to stare, let her stare. No doubt the other prisoners already thought him a madman.

He counted the steps as he walked, wondering how long it would take before she either left or had to break the silence. On each turn he saw she was still there, staring at him with a bored, almost irritated expression, utterly motionless. She never seemed even close to speaking.

He was on 112when he turned abruptly to where she stood and raised his eyebrows at her. She still said nothing, only tilted her head back a little to look him fully in the eyes. He swallowed his irritation at having to be the one to break the silence.

“Haven’t had enough of my face and voice yet, little weed?” he asked, perfectly pleasant. 

“I believe I am suffering from overexposure,” she returned. 

“Still,” he said, raising a hand to gesture airily at the oblivious guards walking past, “it seems an awful bit of trouble, to hide yourself from all but me just to throw childish insults.”

Her eyebrows lowered a little. Had she thought he wouldn’t put it together?

“Very impressive of you,” he continued, voice dripping with condescension. “I didn’t learn such a complicated application of magic until I was quite a bit older than you.”

It was actually true, but he doubted she’d realize that.

“My standards aren’t so low that surpassing you would give me pride,” she told him, and turned her head to follow the progression of the guards as they went down the hall. Then, with an air of resignation, she smoothed her skirts and sat, hands around knees, facing him. Even with her serious face and careful, prim way of holding herself as she sat, it made her look very young and childish.

He, too, sat, though on the side of his bed. He laid his hands beside him, palms down over the edge of the mattress. Aside from his mother, who hadn’t visited even via simulacrum since that first time, he’d had no one to hold a conversation with except this strange little magically proficient girl.

“What would?”

She looked a little surprised. “What would…?”

He gestured to her. “What would give you pride?”

She was silent for awhile, as if, to his amusement, she were actually pondering the question. Then she said, “Nothing that could be related to you.”

He judged it rather weak as a comeback, and leaned back a little, satisfied, craning his head to look at the ceiling rather than her. “I wonder,” he said, “What I possibly could have done to capture your interest so thoroughly.”

“Nothing,” she told him. “You haven’t.”

“And yet you are here again.”

“Not by my own design.”

“No?” He dropped his gaze from the ceiling, looking down the length of his nose at her. “By whose?”

“Your mother.”

That brought him up short. “Frigga sent you?”

“No, your other mother,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm.

He nearly laughed. “Pray tell, why should Frigga send weedy little girls to watch me?”

“It is not mine to question,” said the girl, too sardonic to be characterized as proper. “I am bound to her and must do as she asks.”

That was surprising. Frigga had never liked the darker magics, necessary as she sometimes found them, and would certainly not have bestowed some sort of compulsion on a little girl. Unless… 

He rose carefully from the bed and went to the window, as close as he could get, and gazed down at her. If only he could send his magic beyond the bounds of this cell! He could feel nothing of her nature through Odin’s barriers. 

She looked up at him as he tilted his head, gazing at her intently. “Who created you?”

“My mistress.”

“Not Frigga,” he said, waiting.

“Not Frigga,” she agreed, and offered nothing else.

Loki had been dancing on the edge of irritated and amused by her for most of the conversation, masking the irritation with pleasantness, but now that was wearing thin.

“So who, then?” he snapped.

“No one you’ve ever known.” Her voice and eyes were equally flat as she said it, and he glared at her for a long moment, trying to quash the flare of fear in the back of his mind. A creature of magical origin, as she’d seemed to admit to being, was not Thanos’s preferred sort of agent, and she was too young to be one of his ‘children’ out on a mission. Besides, her behaviour did not match an assassin or agent out to destroy him.

In fact, from her expression and posture, she seemed to be refusing to tell him solely out of spite. Which again left him oscillating between aggravation and surprised, wry amusement. A very juvenile way to treat potentially important information indeed. From long experience, he could guess that the more anxious he seemed to know, the more satisfaction she would take in refusing to tell him.

So Loki looked away and exhaled, spreading out his hands with the palms downward and stepping back as he schooled his expression. More amiably, he went on. “I wonder then how you came to be in service to Asgard’s queen. Had you no other, more pressing tasks?”

This brought a little of a reaction, her jaw clenching a moment before she spoke. “I had completed them,” she said.

“Well, they can’t have been as fun.” He’d returned his voice to its earlier lilt, a jest in expectation of a jibe to follow.

“They were remarkably similar to the one I have now,” she said, and he raised an eyebrow. She continued, voice scathing, “I was watching over a stupid boy.”

He reminded himself of how ridiculous it would be to display offense in response to anything said by a child, even a magically constructed one. The insult was not important – the tidbit of information was. A ‘stupid boy’ – how frequently had Sif described Thor as such when they were all young? “Did he grow bored of you and send you away?”

He’d rather hoped to strike a nerve with that, but she only said “No,” quite easily. 

He made a show of sighing and tilting his head back with hands half raised in mock supplication. “Well, I shall try to measure up,” he said. 

There was no reply. He lowered his hands slowly, expression changing as he did. He looked back over his cell first, as if taking it all in once more, and then looked out the window again.

She was gone.

**Asgard**

Travel by Bifrost was a more harrowing experience than Loki had expected. He had not thought to be brought to Asgard so immediately, though he had hoped for it. It was Volstagg who facilitated it, volunteering to escort him along with the first group of prisoners to Asgard, giving Thor the time to speak to his father first.

Volstagg let him cling to him as they were transported. Clearly, this one shared the other’s softness for children. It was a good thing, too, for Loki might have fallen otherwise as they landed. The machinery shone and spun in the aftermath of the burst of energy used to pull them along the rainbow path, and his senses seemed to spin with it. He marveled at the obviously highly technological innovation at play here, so different from the Asgardia he knew. 

Heimdall, too, was different. Taller, darker, somehow more commanding of respect than the one Loki had known. He settled an eerie, golden gaze on Loki as Einherjar led the prisoners away and Volstagg explained his presence.

“Yes,” said Heimdall, the deep rumble of his voice making Loki’s toes tingle. “Thor has spoken to the All-Father. He wishes to speak to you.”

“Thor does?” Loki’s voice sounded inadequately small after Heimdall’s. He did not bother trying to hide the hope in it – they already thought him a bit of a fanboy, clearly. 

“No. The All-Father.” A slow blink of his lashes, and Heimdall’s gaze went back to the stars beyond them.

Volstagg looked rather surprised. Loki, somehow, was not – only uneasy. Volstagg seemed almost about to speak, but Heimdall said, without looking at either of them. “I suspect it has something to do with the weapon you bear.”

Oh. Right. Heimdall, who can see everything. Loki gulped and crossed his arms over his chest nervously.

“The weapon I - ?” began Volstagg, utterly baffled, and then he realized the comment was not addressed to him. He turned his shocked gaze on Loki, taking in his obvious guilt and discomfort.

“I – er, I can explain about that, it’s actually quite a good – a good tale,” he said hastily, waving a hand as if to fend off an attack.

“I should hope so,” said Volstagg. He did not call for reinforcements, as Loki had half expected him to do, only grasped his arm firmly and began to lead them up the rainbow hued path. There was a pair of horses waiting for them, looking surprisingly ordinary in contrast to their cosmic surroundings. Volstagg did not trust him to one of the mounts on his own, but pulled him up on his and brought it to a canter. Loki allowed himself a tiny sigh of regret. The beauty of the stars and ocean were passing him by so quickly, and more upsettingly he had already lost the good standing he’d seemed to have with this Volstagg. How unfair.

They clattered through the streets, probably on the quickest path to the palace. Volstagg forewent any formalities in the place itself, leaving the horse with a stable boy and pulling Loki quickly through the great halls to the throne room. The whole place seemed a great deal more grand and… futuristic than the Asgardia Loki had known.

“All-Father!” Volstagg boomed as he brought Loki past the guards to the throne room. He shoved him down to the floor, forcing him to kneel as he did, so that Loki’s first sight of the Odin of this world was a brief glimpse of him in his armour, standing before the throne, a hand raised to one of his ravens.

“Volstagg,” came the All-Father’s voice, at once a command and an invitation to speak. Loki could not help shivering at the sound of it – it sounded almost older, wearier than that of the Odin he’d known, but still utterly authoritative.

Beside him, Volstagg was moving his lips wordlessly, apparently searching for words. At last he found them. “This is the child Thor spoke to you of, the one who wished to come to Asgard. Heimdall spoke of a weapon…”

“Yes.” The bird flew off in a flutter of feathers. Loki kept his gaze on the ground, mouth dry. He’d had time to think up something of a story to explain the crown’s presence, but it felt thin even to him. Should he forget all that and simply tell the truth, as far-fetched and potentially trouble-causing as it was? Oh, it was ridiculous, but he so sorely missed Ikol’s feathery weight and sly, dubious advice. He could have done with some input right now, no matter how disreputable the source.

Volstagg rose with a clatter, and Loki looked up at him sideways, almost wanting to beg him not to go. Odin must have signaled to him in some way.

“Look at me,” commanded Odin, and Loki did so, immediately. The king had sat back in his throne now, the bird perched on its back. He looked… old, but still regal, still powerful. His face was unreadable. From the corners of his eyes, Loki could see the hall ringed with guards at far intervals, and Volstagg a respectful distance away, still within the room. There was no one else, no courtiers or other sons of Odin to watch. Not even Thor was present, and he wondered if Odin had simply not mentioned the weapon to him, said only that he would grant this orphan child succor in the halls of Asgard and let him go on to celebrate his victory.

“Do you wonder how I knew of this weapon you brought?”

Loki swallowed. Time for the show, as mortals termed it.

“No, All-Father.” He took a breath and stood slowly, head still slightly bowed in deference. “I am acquainted with the most glorious tales of good Heimdall’s prowess as an observer and guardian.”

A quick glance at the king’s expression, which had not changed. He went on, raising his head a little. “However… am I right to guess he does not know the nature of this weapon? He can see it, and know its power, but not from whence it came.”

“You wish to enlighten us?” The All-Father looked unimpressed as yet, and Loki nodded.

“Yes, yes, you see…” Here he hesitated a moment, mostly for effect, and then he reached into the pocket at the front of his tunic, where the crown had been kept safe thus far, and pulled it out to display with a little flourish. “There!”

Odin leaned forward a little, staring at it intently, and Loki noticed the guards around the room tensing. “It is no ordinary weapon, formed from metals and alloys or strange, concentrated magics of the usual sort,” he continued. He was beginning to get into the swing of it, and almost enjoying himself. “It is formed from raw fear stuff, an evil plague of psychological torment given physical shape by sordid means…”

And he spun for them the tale he’d come up with on the wild ride through the city. He told them of a demon, the likes of which had never been seen, that came up to torment his family as they dwelt alone in the wilds of Vanaheim. He told them of the nightly terrors it sent, until he and his sisters and parents were nearly mad, and of how it had visited them in the guise of a kindly exorcist – and pulled the fear stuff from their heads in masses, quickly, harshly, cutting out the spark of their life as it went, until it came to him.

“Me, it spared,” he said, adding a tiny tremble to his voice, “So that it could tell me that I was the cause of its coming, and… and punish me by the knowledge of what deeds my actions had brought.” For the demon, he explained, had found its way through dead space to his home because he, Serrure, had foolishly released it from whatever bounds it had been under by playing at a magic spell he’d found in an ancient book. But leaving him alive to gloat was the villain’s undoing, as it usually was (Loki knew this, because he’d found a list on the internet once that placed this flaw in one of the top ten reasons villains tended to fail in the execution of their plans). For as the demon worked to create this strange and awesome weapon from the fear stuff, in the shape of a crown bearing the face of the child who had unknowingly freed it, Serrure called to his mind what else he had read in that ancient book and, as the demon completed its creation, spoke aloud the spell to destroy it.

The demon caught afire with an unholy flame that spread to and consumed the whole of Serrure’s family’s house. He himself barely escaped with his life. The fire blazed all night as he watched from the surrounding woods, magically constrained to the house where the evil deeds had been done, and when Serrure came to look the next morning nothing but ashes remained of the house, Serrure’s family, the book, or the demon. Yet lying atop the ashes was the demon’s creation, the crown of Fear Stuff.

“I did not know what to do with it,” said Loki. “I am not sure that it can be destroyed, and I do not know how to wield it – not that I ever intended to! I thought it best to take it with me and look for a safe place to store it. I traveled alone, to keep it hidden and safe from any other who may seek to use it. I have heard that in Asgard, many fabled treasures are kept, so I wished… to bring it here.”

It was an absurd tale, the stuff of fancy and fireside talk, full of unverifiable elements and vague, prettily dressed explanations, relying too much on the sympathy to be expected on admitting to being the unknowing cause of his family’s death. Loki stared earnestly at Odin at its completion, his hands still half-raised in extravagant gesture as he held the crown.

The All-Father did not look particularly convinced, but he held out his hand. “Bring this crown to me,” he said, not even addressing the story of its supposed conception. Loki did so, handing it up carefully into his great hands as the raven on the back of the throne watched him with beady eyes, making him think again of Ikol. For long moments Odin looked at it, turning it this way and that. Loki stood nervously, back to the rest of the mostly empty hall, wishing he could see the reactions of anyone besides Odin to his story. He wasn’t sure if he thought any of them would fall for it, but Asgardians were Asgardians and tended to have a soft spot for drama and adventure and pathos in any tale of doings.

He caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye and, following it, turned his head a little to see a woman standing by one of the pillars near to the throne end of the hall. She wore a beautiful blue dress, and her hair was pulled elegantly back to fall over her shoulders. Her face was that of a mature woman, her expression closed yet somehow softer than the ageless beauty of the Frigga Loki was familiar with. For this had to be Frigga, with her queenly bearing and easy, assured access to Odin’s throne room as he attended to kingly business.

Her gaze flicked to him, bright and knowing, and he looked quickly away.

“You mean to give this into my custody,” said Odin at last, turning his one-eyed gaze once more on Loki. “And spend the rest of your days safe in Asgard.”

“Ah…” The rest of his days, perhaps not. But that could be dealt with later. “Yes, my lord.”

Odin sat back a moment, reaching to the spear that leaned against the throne. He stood, folding his hand around it slowly as he rose up, to all his intimidating height. He kept his eye fixed on Loki as, with the crown gripped firmly in his left hand, he raised the spear in his right and set it firmly to the ground, producing a deep ring that made Loki jump.

“It is done,” pronounced Odin All-Father, King of Asgard. “This object will be taken to be safely kept and hidden, and you, Serrure, will find a home among the Asgardians. This I pronounce as King.”

Loki bowed, almost low enough to count as groveling. “Thank you, oh All-Father. Thank you.”

There was real gratitude as he said it – the Fear Crown would likely be safer kept in Asgard than stuck on his person, carried about wherever he went.

The weight of Odin’s attention left him, and he took this as a dismissal. He stood once more, and this time raised his head as he did. Frigga had approached the throne, and was addressing the All-Father. Loki turned away before they could catch him staring, privately wondering at the barely concealed affection in Odin’s regard of her. Whatever else this All-Father was, he seemed a less aloof figure than the one Loki had known.

 

“Do you believe him?” Frigga’s voice was soft as she spoke to her husband, her eyes on the strange boy as he walked to Volstagg. His step was not that of any ordinary nervous, subdued peasant addressing the ruler of the Realms.

“Do you?” asked Odin. She exchanged a glance with him.

He lifted the item the boy had given him, the better for her to scrutinize. He had likely done so himself already, but she reached out with her magic nonetheless to examine it. The sickly, malevolent power in it was so shockingly strong that she stopped almost immediately, eyes widening. 

Odin, watching her, nodded. “It is an evil thing. I have never before seen its like.”

He looked out over the room for some moments, lost in thought. Ordinarily, Frigga might tease him. She knew that look, from long experience. Odin, in many ways, was very like her younger son. When faced with that which he had never before seen he wished to understand it, to discern its nature. 

But she, too, was preoccupied. It was not simply that she doubted much of Serrure’s tale, but that the appearance of this one odd child of mysterious origin followed so closely on the heels of the other, though he at least was no magical construct. She had kept knowledge of the girl Leah to herself and Heimdall’s faith in the queen’s judgement meant he was unlikely to speak to Odin of her presence unless directly asked about it. It meant she could not very well speak to Odin about her concerns in that vein, yet they troubled her all the more for it.

At last Odin spoke. “I think this weapon deserves some study.”

“And the boy?”

Odin’s thumb stroked along the surface of the crown. “He, as well.”

 

Sif found Volstagg outside the tavern they had long preferred to hold their victory celebrations in. With so many things having changed in so short a time, it was comforting to have this age old tradition to return to.

She nodded to him as she approached. Fandral was already inside, which was a pity as for all his foolishness he had a gift for easily and lightheartedly broaching awkward and sensitive subjects. Ah, well, she could manage well enough. 

“Heimdall tells me you had good cause for your mad rush to the palace earlier,” she said, keeping her voice mildly teasing. 

“Would you suspect otherwise?” asked Volstagg. He, too, was teasing in his response. But there was a serious cast to his features as he led the way in.

Inside, it was already quite lively. Their habitual table was at the far end, so they had numerous rowdy customers wishing them congratulations to dodge around as they went. 

“Truly, no,” said Sif. As their table came into view, she halted and pulled Volstagg a little aside. “Am I correct in thinking it regarded him?”

For at the table sat the strange boy, Serrure, among Volstagg’s wife and children. He had changed from his ridiculous clothing to a more standard tunic and leggings, his hair unadorned. He looked totally at his ease as he chattered to two of Volstagg’s children. 

Volstagg, watching, looked somewhat less so. “You are,” he said, and then he quickly, quietly told Sif about what had transpired after he and the boy had arrived.

“A fine tale,” said Sif when he had finished. She supposed it explained a little of his odd behaviour when asked about his family, and she could not, on the face of it, find cause to disbelieve it, aside from its very extraordinariness. Perhaps now that things were finally coming to relative rest in the Nine Realms the All-Father would find time to send someone to verify it somehow. “And so you have taken him in?”

“For now,” said Volstagg. “I mislike the thought of a child who has suffered so remaining uncared for.”

Sif considered, and decided against, venturing a query about the wisdom of taking a child who’d already brought destruction down on one family into another. It was an unkind thought, and anyway not her business. Volstagg was her friend, but she and the other Warriors’ Three would never venture to question his choices for his family.

She wished that Hogun had not stayed behind in Vanaheim. She understood his wish to take care of home affairs, especially after the disruption there, but he had always been so good to speak of concerns to. He had as much battle lust as any of them, maybe more, but for many things his watchful nature was of utmost benefit. He could be relied upon to have a carefully considered opinion on anything suspicious.

Fandral, one arm already about a maiden’s shoulders, had caught sight of Sif and Volstagg. He waved them over with a tankard. 

“Come!” he called over the din of the tavern, “I’m ready to be proper soused, and it’s hard to do without the proper company – no offense to you,” he added to the maid on his arm, who only laughed and chinked his drink with hers before downing it. He applauded her with one hand against his mug as Sif and Volstagg came up.

“Thor’s not here yet?” said Sif as Volstagg went first, as ever, to greet his wife.

Fandral pointed.

“I was just getting drinks,” came Thor’s voice from behind her. He was indeed, carrying an entire tray full of them.

“That’s what the servers are for,” she told him, taking one and seating herself. He smiled, looking down as he set the tray on the table.

“I needed the excuse to stretch my legs,” he said. 

At the other end of the table, Serrure looked up from whatever story he was telling the children. Thor gestured a hello with his tankard and took a long draught from it, and the boy gave him a nervous smile and looked away again.

“I think you’ve a fan,” said Sif. 

“I suppose,” said Thor. He frowned a little. “He lied about why he wanted to come.”

So he had heard the story. She wondered who had told him, Volstagg or Odin himself. Once she would have guessed their friend first, but ever since Thor’s banishment and return he and the All-Father had seemed closer. 

“Yet here he is, and no harm done it seems.” She would have gone on, perhaps, sharing a little more of her reservations, but they were interrupted by a passing celebrator shouting their praises. Thor, smiling, returned them, and after the mood had changed enough that she did not want to spoil it by bringing up doubts and worries again.

The celebration lasted long into the night, Volstagg consenting to give his children rides on his shoulders and sips of his drink, a slightly harder liquor than that usually served to children, under the only mildly disapproving eye of his wife. 

As time went on, Sif found herself keeping a closer eye on Thor than Serrure. He joined in the festivities, the drinking and the joke-making and all of that, but he seemed subdued, far less uproarious than he once had been. Another change, and again one she could not decide if she liked or not. At length, in a quiet moment, he stood and excused himself.

She stayed some moments more, trying not to be too obvious about her aim. She knew already where he would be going. The same place he went every night they were not fighting across one realm or another.

She noticed Serrure’s gaze on her, as if he was waiting for her to make her move and she frowned at him. He looked quickly away, and she stood then, slipping away with only the briefest gesture of goodbye to Fandral and Volstagg.

 

“You’ll have to tell me,” said Loki, leaning in conspiratorially to Volstagg’s eldest daughter, “Are Thor and the Lady Sif…?”

He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. She may have been a little younger than him but Hilde was worldly enough to understand such innuendos. Rather like the one in his world, really, and it was a bit disconcerting to run across such similarity matched up with utter differences.

All of Volstagg’s family had been like that – fat, kind Gudrun, and the many children of the brood altogether, all ready to welcome him into the fold. It hadn’t even been hard to find some less ‘outlandish’ (privately, he felt they were just too stylistically eye-catching for this version of Asgard to handle) clothing for him to wear to the celebration, so used to lending out clothing to various children here and there as they were.

Surprisingly, Volstagg had not decided he didn’t want him in his home. Whatever Odin’s opinion of the story he’d told of the demon, Volstagg and his wife did not seem to consider it much of a strike against him. Indeed, the obvious ploy for sympathy in laying the death of his fictional family at his own feet seemed to have worked, and Gudrun had nearly doted on him, forbidding the children to ask him about his past.

Which, of course, they did anyway as soon as their back was turned. He’d been entertaining himself – and them – all night with made up on-the-spot recitations of various events and peoples. It was risky, he knew. He didn’t even need Ikol there to remind him that relying on his own knowledge of how Vanaheim in his world worked was not enough to go by. So he fudged things as much as possible, remaining vague on details like place names and so on. Children really didn’t care about that sort of thing anyway.

And now, after having been milked for all the false information and gossip he could give (and he’d prefaced everything by explaining that woefully, he and his family had been dreadfully unconnected from the beating pulse of most of Vanaheim’s social scene), it was his turn to be educated.

Hilde leaned in close, her voice hushed. “No - or at least they’ve never _said_ they are, and Daddy won’t let me ask. He says it’s not my business.”

“Goodness, doesn’t he know romantic relationships are everybody’s?” said Loki. 

She gave him a look. “But _I’ve_ watched them, and I think there isn’t any… funny business going on. At least not from both sides.”

“Ooh, is there pining? I love pining.” He pulled his head in even closer, all anticipation.

“Well,” said Hilde, eyes raised to the ceiling, with the air of one who had some very important information to impart. “I’m not _supposed_ to talk about it, especially with strangers.”

He waited, certain she would do so anyway.

“But I _guess_ if you’re joining the family…”

“I am!” He gave her a little grin, and she grinned back, clearly pleased, at least for now, at the prospect.

With a last glance at her father, who was occupied with making her little sister laugh while she perched on his shoulder, she leaned in and said in a hurried, quiet voice, “See, _Sif_ is always looking after Thor, but I don’t think he’s ever noticed her that way, but before… you see, this isn’t the whole lot of them, that you see now.”

He looked around the table. “You mean…”

“There are – there used to be two more of my Daddy’s friends that were always with them when they went adventuring. One of them you probably saw, but he stayed behind in Vanaheim because that’s his home, too, and he wants to help build it up again. That’s Hogun.”

Loki nodded, following, privately still a little bemused at Hogun being a Vanir.

“The other stopped being a part of the group before that…”

As soon as she said that, her nose wrinkling a bit as she tried to figure out the best way to say the next part, he knew at once who the other was. He kept his silence, though, waiting for her to say it.

“That was Loki. The other prince of Asgard. But he turned traitor a little while ago and did some bad stuff on Midgard and such. Well, actually, he did some bad stuff here first, and then they thought he died, and then they found out he didn’t and he was terrorizing the Midgardians, and now he’s locked up. But _before_ all that, I always thought he and Sif were…”

“… together,” finished Loki. 

“Well, _maybe_. I always thought he liked her. Probably not anymore.” She looked a little sad as she said this. That, Loki could believe. But he could not, actually, imagine that any version of Sif would ever be interested in any version of Loki.

But what she’d said had far more effect than even the all-important implications for a war of ships, as he’d seen tumblr scribes refer to such squabbles over imagined relationships. There was a Loki here, as he should have supposed there must be, and he was evidently a bad guy. But not, apparently, for as long as he’d been in the world Loki had come from, if little Hilde could remember the days before he went bad. Or perhaps he’d been better at hiding it?

“You can’t see him,” said Hilde, noticing his silence and guessing at the cause. “Daddy says the King has forbidden people to visit him.”

Loki held up his hands. “Oh, I would not wish to,” he said. “Scary, realms-crossing criminals are not high on my list of people I want to meet.”

It was, in fact, the truth. The last other Loki he’d known had been conspiring to murder him from the moment they met, after all.

He steered the topic back to less serious, important discussions, asking her silly questions about Asgardian customs so that she could laud her superior knowledge over him. It seemed to work. But inside he was wondering if this Loki was as safely caged as they seemed to think he was.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art by thusspakekate

**Midgard**

Jane woke up on the late side the day of her date with Richard. She’d stayed up late, as usual, running through data and sequences until Darcy called to remind her she didn’t want to be a zombie the next day.

It meant that she hurried through her morning routine, scarfing down a bowl of cereal before she went to continue the work of the night before. She felt guilty as she sat down before her computer systems, unable to keep herself from remembering that the pathway she was searching for was also a means to bring Thor back into her life. She tried to rationalize it away. This was a scientific exploration, and discovering the means of interstellar travel would have incredible implications for everyone on Earth, especially in light of the alien invasion in New York… which reminded her again of Thor. Great.

She pushed away from the computer desk, swearing. She wasn’t usually so fixated on Thor, not these days, but going on a date with someone was making her feel disloyal which was _completely_ ridiculous because it wasn’t as if they’d made any promises to one another. Or… well, he’d said he’d come back, and he hadn’t! And when he had, he hadn’t spared even a moment to come say hi or call or give any impression he remembered or cared about her at all!

She shook her head and stood, angry with herself. Falling into a self-righteous rage over the indignity of pining after someone who she was beginning to worry wasn’t really worth pining after was not what she wanted to deal with in the hours before a date with another person. She had to get herself out of that frame of mind.

She glanced at the kitchen clock and decided it wasn’t too early to shower and begin getting ready, especially when she was having so much difficulty focussing on work. Better to not risk being late. 

She held a hand over her mouth as she yawned on her way to the bathroom, even though she was completely alone. Her mother had been kind enough to grant her full use of the house while she was away at her holiday home in Italy, so that she could have a base of operations while she waited for Eric to contact her – if he ever would.

She took a leisurely long time in the shower, washing away the worries and stress in her mind in the steam, and took her time towelling off her hair before she pulled out the blow-drier. She’d laid her outfit out the night before, a nice skirt and blouse combo, completely without Darcy’s teasing input. It was as she was putting the finishing touches on her makeup that she heard a soft, buzzing alert from one of her machines. Luckily, she’d finished with her eyes. A misapplication of blush could be quickly rubbed away as she ran across the room to the source of the noise.

Numbers flashed across the screen, a red indicator blinking to show an anomaly. She stood over the desk, staring at it. She had never seen readings like this before, not even when Thor had first come. This was something entirely new.

A loud pop song sounded out from tinny speakers and she reached for her phone, too distracted to even be exasperated by the ring tone. 

“Jane! Did you just get a really _weird_ indication on your spectrometer thingy?”

Jane sighed. “Darcy, it’s not a spectrometer, a spectrometer is used to measure light - ”

“Whatever, your weird science indicator thing! Because the portable one you gave me to keep track of just went haywire. Please tell me it’s not just me.”

“It isn’t. Something’s happened, something I’ve never seen before. How soon can you get here?” Darcy, or more precisely Darcy’s vehicle, was exactly what she needed right now. Whatever this was, it was important and extremely relevant to her work, she knew it. She could pinpoint the area of disturbance as they went.

“Umm, pretty soon. But, uh, are you sure you…?”

About to snap _“What do you mean, am I sure? Of course I’m sure!”_ Jane abruptly recalled that she was expected at a restaurant by Richard in – glancing quickly at the clock – less than an hour. Even if Darcy arrived right away it would be impossible to get to the site, get the data she needed, and be back in time to meet up with him.

She grimaced, torn for a moment. He seemed like a really nice guy, and standing people up was really not something she liked doing. But this was _important_.

“Yeah. Yeah! I just – I have to make a quick call, okay? See you in a bit.” 

“Uh, okay – ”

Jane hung up before Darcy had finished speaking, pulling up Richard’s number on her contact list and feeling guilty already for the lack of real regret she felt about cancelling. Even assuming this had nothing to do with Thor – and despite the tiny, expectant, thrilling hope rising in her chest that she couldn’t quite squash, she had to assume that that was most likely the case – even assuming that, this was something _happening_ , some startlingly new phenomenon to document, which was more than could be said for almost the entirety of her stay in England so far. This was what she lived for. 

 

The same aberration that was causing such excitement and upheaval for Jane was noted also in another lab, located much closer to the source than she was. The SHIELD technician responsible for observation of such activity dutifully reported the event, with more apprehension than excitement. Incidents involving otherworldly energy spikes tended to be headache-inducing at the best, body-count-giving at the worst. 

The technician’s superiors reviewed her report quickly and efficiently, and in a brief matter of minutes had assembled a task force to deal with it.

Not all of the members were understanding ‘deal with it’ to mean quite the same thing. This particular SHIELD outpost had been very heavily infected by HYDRA personnel, but a few genuine agents remained among them. For their benefit, the debriefing emphasized the dangers posed by the last otherworldly contacts made in the past few years – the Asgardian grudge match that leveled a town in America, the invasion of aliens, the appearance and use of otherworldly artefacts and weapon. For the safety of the people, this threat had to be found and contained, immediately.

The SHIELD agents understood this to mean the target was to be removed from the public and brought into confinement for possible interrogation and security examination.

The HYDRA agents understood this to mean the target was to be removed from the public and brought into confinement for interrogation and research purposes, never again to see the light of day. This was, after all, a prime opportunity not often given.

The task force set out, united only in their aim to neutralize the target.

 

Leah fell from Hela’s green portal into the path of an oncoming train. It was slowing down, as it had been coming in to the station, and may not have hit her anyway, but disoriented as she was she could see only the oncoming danger of it and flung up a hand that threw up a flickering green wall of power before it. The train screeched to a stop as it ran into the barrier, suddenly enough to give a nasty jolt to the passengers within, and Leah, breathing heavily with exertion, stood up slowly and tried to make sense of what was going on.

She stood on a set of tracks, enclosed between a sloping wall and a tiled floor that stood at about the height of her head. The lighting was bright and artificial, and the noise was incredible. On the platform and on the train there were people rushing about and shouting and screaming at one another – and at her. Her barrier had already faded, its job done.

Leah looked up at the shifting feet on the platform, then farther up still, to where a multitude of faces was gawking down at her and dozens of hands held up small machines - _cellphones_ she recalled, probably recording a video of her.

Midgard. But why should Hela send her _here_ of all places?

She walked up to the platform edge and considered it for a moment. “I don’t suppose I could get a hand up?” she said, going for unruffled and imperious. No one stepped forward – in fact quite a few people stepped back.

“Are you an alien?” said one brave youth, still filming. “You coming to London as well as New York now?”

She ignored him in favour of setting her hands on the platform and pulling herself up as gracefully as she could. As she stood, a hush was beginning to fall over the crowd. She gazed up at them all – for they were most of them still taller than her – and found herself utterly at a loss. Her first, reflexive thought was to open a portal and go straight back to where she’d come from, but she had used too much power in that panicked barrier and would have to take a little time to recuperate before she could erect any portals of her own.

In the meantime… how did one deal with mortals again? Particularly British ones? She reached back to the fuzzy, filmy memories of the Leah that had been Loki’s best friend, to the time they’d spent in London, and then to the films he had shown her on his Pad of I.

“I am no alien,” she said, raising her voice a little. “I am from Asgardia. I mean no harm.”

The words sounded cold, insincere from her lips. She could remember dealing with Hela’s various callers with ease and confidence, and had herself raised up the Vanir in high fury against Asgard, but to placate this mass of spooked humans seemed a different situation entirely. Instead of soothing them, declaring her tie to Asgardia seemed to excite them even more.

“Are you – are you a Loki sort of Asgardian, or a Thor sort?” said the same youth as before, his eyes fixed on the screen of his phone as he filmed her. 

“Neither,” said Leah, scowling. 

Perhaps something about her voice made him look up, straight at her, and he said in a rather different voice, “fuck, you’re like, a _kid_ \- ”

Someone screamed, and there was a clattering of activity as several heavy, armoured men clattered down from whatever above-earth level there was for this station and fanned out in the area, shoving past people and shouting at them to get down.

Leah found herself surrounded, the long barrels of several guns pointed straight at her and opaque, helmeted faces all turned her way. 

“Put your hands in the air!” came a man’s authoritative, threatening voice. Leah stared at him, astonished. “Now! Or we _will_ shoot!”

They raised their guns higher, threatening, and she obeyed, more out of a desire to avoid accidentally setting off a bloodbath among the humans than out of fear. She doubted the guns could hurt her.

Two armoured men came forward and grabbed her, patting her down, and she nearly shoved them away from her. She had the strength to do it. But the others’ guns were still all trained on her, and it didn’t seem worth the risk. She settled for glaring at them.

The man who seemed to be in charge barked an order to move out, and the armoured men fell into a rectangular platoon formation, marching Leah to the centre of it. It all felt faintly ridiculous to her, and also deeply strange. Even in Broxton, where tensions between the gods and the mortals had been quite high at times, such behaviour was unheard of. 

“Dudes, she’s like… twelve,” said a voice as she was bustled away, and she glanced back to see the youth who had spoken before half rising from his crouch. Two of the armoured men were moving about the civilians, taking their recording devices from them, and one of these shoved him back to the ground. She heard him yelp in protest as they smashed his phone.

 

The time it had taken Darcy to drive to Jane and then to pinpoint and get to the source of the disruption was too long. By the time they – including the new intern Darcy had apparently taken it upon herself to hire – had arrived, the station was already roped off, with dozens of commuters being directed to take different routes.

“Oh, no,” breathed Jane, and she leapt from the car almost before it had finished moving. “Excuse me! Excuse me,” she said, bustling up to an officer in an orange vest. “What is going on here?”

“Sorry miss,” said the officer, giving her a distantly apologetic look, “You’ll have to go to the station down the road. This one’s out of service at the moment.”

“And why’s that?”

“Ah… problem with the mechanism, I think, I’m not sure. We’ve just been asked to redirect traffic. If you please.” He gestured up the road.

“A – a problem with the mechanism?! That’s total – ” 

Darcy managed to catch up to her and begin pulling her away before she could finish. “Sorry, sir, she’s not had her daily caffeine dose yet!” she yelled as an excuse, and the officer nodded distractedly.

“They’ve got a _problem_ with the _mechanism?_ That’s ludicrous! That’s the cheapest… non-excuse…”

“Hey, give them a break, they probably didn’t have time to come up with a better one,” said Darcy. “We must have just missed it, whatever it was.”

“Yeah, _whatever it was_.” Jane flung up her hands. “This is so unfair! I almost had it! _How_ are we supposed to get anything now?”

“Er… Dr. Foster?” came the new intern’s – Ian’s – faintly worried voice. He had hung back while Darcy went to prevent Jane from verbally abusing the officer, and was now trotting over from an area of the sidewalk that had been roped off where several people were being looked over by emergency aid workers. Jane had been so focused on reaching the train station she hadn’t registered their presence before. She frowned as she looked over at them, wondering if they’d been involved and what the authorities intended to do to hush things up if they had been.

“What is it?” She tried to keep herself from snapping the phrase, but her words caused his throat to bob nervously anyway.

“There’s a, ah, there’s a young man who has something…” Ian trailed off as Jane set off toward the people. She could see the young man he spoke of already, a tall, dark youth who was looking across at them.

“Hi,” she said, walking straight up to him and holding out her hand. “I’m Dr. Jane Foster.”

“John,” he said, shaking her hand quickly. “You’re a…?”

“I’m a scientist,” she explained, “That sort of doctor, not the medical kind. I study atmospheric phenomenon, among other things.” 

He sized her up in the space of a few seconds. The aid workers, occupied with the people they were examining, ignored them, and the officers were kept busy redirecting traffic and preventing people from entering the train station.

“Okay,” he said.

That was probably enough for introductions. “You were there? You saw what happened? What was it?”

“Yeah, I was there. I saw it. Crazy shit. They sent a whole bunch of armoured goons… it was total overkill.”

“Overkill for what?” Darcy had arrived. Ian hovered a few feet behind, looking around to keep watch.

“Was there some sort of phenomena?” asked Jane.

John shook his head. “No. Well, sorta… look, maybe this sounds crazy, but there… there was this green, I don’t know, _portal_ and a girl fell out of it.”

“A girl?” said Jane, while Darcy pointed out “hey, we had aliens attacking New York not long ago, nothing sounds crazy anymore.”

“Yeah. She fell right in front of a train, and then she did something, she made it stop with, like, green light before it hit her, and we were all kind of freaking out. She was just a kid though, or she looked like one. She said she was from Asgard.”

“Asgard?” Jane’s heart leapt to her throat. A girl from Asgard, arriving via green portal. What did that mean?

“You’re saying they sent a platoon of armoured creeps after a little girl?” said Darcy, nose wrinkling. “Dude, that’s fucked up.”

“Right? They didn’t fight her or anything, just took her away with them. It was all really fast. Some of them stayed behind, destroying people’s phones and stuff. They said this was classified stuff, nothing to worry about, but it’s going to be all over the news anyway.”

Jane exhaled. “This sounds just like SHIELD. Typical, overreacting, overbearing _creeps_.”

John gave her a curious look, and, after a quick glance around, reached surreptitiously into his coat pocket. From it he produced an iPod.

“What’s that?”

“They took my phone, because it was the one I was being obvious about. But I was recording audio on this the whole time. Protestors’ trick.” He passed it over to Jane, who blinked in surprise.

“I – thanks.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’d barely put any of my songs on it yet, anyway.”

“Why… are you giving this to us?” asked Darcy, her voice skeptical.

“I didn’t like what I saw,” said John, shrugging. “You say you’re a scientist, and I saw you arguing with the policeman. You’re good people, you can get this out there. They might come back and search me again, but now the evidence is safe.”

Behind them, Ian said “Er… heads up.”

Jane glanced to the side, saw a pair of officers beginning to take notice of her and John standing together. She ducked her head and backed away. “Thank you,” she said, serious. “We’ll do what we can. You stay safe.”

“You, too,” said John, moving away as well.

They walked hurriedly back to the car, Jane stuffing her hands in her pockets to hide the iPod. Once inside it, Jane pulled out the iPod out of sight of the windshield. Darcy and Ian leaned over for a closer look but Jane waved them away. 

“Just drive!” she said, glancing anxiously out the windshield. “We need to get out of here. It’s all audio, anyway.”

She checked through the iPod, looking for some indication of a bug or remote reporting device of some sort connected to it. John had been telling the truth about not having many songs on it. She had located the recording and was about to ask Darcy for her headphones when Ian leaned forward again from the back seat.

“Dr. Foster, there’s…” He held out the portable device Jane had given Darcy. 

She glanced at it, distracted, and then did a double take.

“It’s malfunctioning,” she said, setting the iPod down in a cup holder so that she could grab it and look closer.

“What’s up?” said Darcy.

“This is…” She trailed off, staring at the instrument. Could the two incidents be related? ”Darcy, wait! Turn around.”

Darcy brought the car to halt, thankfully already on an out of the way side street. “Uh, turn around? You sure?”

“Yes!” 

Darcy carefully began a three point turn, mindful of the narrowness of the street. “Think another Asgardian’s showed up?”

Jane shook her head, not letting herself hope. “There’s another anomaly, we have to get – that way.” She pointed, and Darcy, obedient, drove on.

 

Leah sat in total darkness. Her hands and feet were bound and her eyes covered with some sort of blindfold. She was in a room alone, that much she could tell from the muffled sound around her. Beyond it, there were men and women speaking indistinctly, machinery whirring.

She had not struggled. She’d reached, once, in her mind, to Hela’s realm. The distance was vast, an impossible gulf of space, and the effort simply of reaching to find a target had taxed her.

So instead she sat still as they bound her to the chair. Hela’s realm was not hard to reach from the Midgard she’d known – either the realm had moved in this short time, or this was not the Midgard she’d known. Given everything else she’d experienced here, the latter seemed to be the more likely case.

There was a mechanical sound and the noise from outside was briefly louder as someone entered the room. She remained sitting with her head facing forward, waiting.

“Our apologies,” said a man’s smooth, bland voice. “We would prefer not to use such abrupt methods, but we’ve had some… past experiences that inform our actions. Interstellar visitors are not always friendly.”

This didn’t seem to require a response, so she gave him none.

“Witnesses suggest you claimed to be from Asgard. Can you confirm this?”

_Asgard_ , not Asgardia. But disputing the difference probably wouldn’t help. She briefly inclined her head.

“We have had dealings with your people in the past,” he continued. “And have no current quarrel with you. What is the purpose for your presence here now?”

What to say? “There is none. I did not intend to come, and will be on my way once you have released me.”

Probably better to let them think she was at their mercy, than show her power too early.

The man paced a moment, as if pondering her response. “Yes… we will see what can be done about that. Do your parents or guardians know where you are? You are very young to be wandering alone. Is there some way to contact them?”

She raised her eyebrows, unseen as they were behind the blindfold. “There is not. I don’t have any.”

The man stopped pacing. “I see.”

His voice was still bland, but she felt a sudden unease. She thought suddenly perhaps she should have lied, given some indication someone was looking for her. 

“Thank you,” said the man, with a distracted air, and then he had left the room.

Leah willed herself to remain still, to not tense in anticipation. She had a vague impression that SHIELD was an entity to be trusted, at least in that they were aligned with heroes, but that was on the Midgard that she knew. She felt no inclination to trust to the goodwill of this man or the rest of the organization that had accosted her here.

Long seconds passed, became minutes, and there was a small noise. A sudden soft release of air – of gas. 

She could wait, still. She didn’t need to breathe as often as mortals. But there was nothing to be gained by it, so she broke the bonds about her wrists. A moment’s vain physical straining showed her they were stronger than she’d hoped, but her magic sliced them apart with relative ease anyway. The blindfold was torn from her face in the next moment, and with only the barest wince in reaction to the shock of bright light about her she assessed her surroundings. A white, empty room, one wall a mirror and the door indistinguishable. The chair was the only other thing in the room – aside from the gas quickly puffing out from small diffusers along the floor of one wall.

There had to be an exit. She took the chair in her hands and gazed toward the side of the room from which she was sure the man had entered, on one side of the mirror. Quickly, quickly. The gas, though she was not overly concerned it would truly harm her, was also thick and obscuring, and they had to be able to see her somehow.

Somehow? She looked again at the mirror. She had lived through eons, sustained by hatred, drifting in sleep through half of time. But she remembered also the videos that Loki had shown another Leah, thrilling movies of spies and government agents. And mirrors were rarely only mirrors in the fairytale lands she’d festered in for so long, either.

Leah smashed the chair with vicious, surprising force against the mirror, and it unsurprisingly shattered. Less expected was the sudden wave of dizziness that took her, and the way she had to lean against the wall, or rather the thickened pane of glass beyond the mirror. The gas was affecting her after all, though she had not breathed it in yet. Perhaps it entered another way, seeping through her ears and eyes and skin. 

The thought brought aggravation rather than fear. She stepped away, dropping the chair and glaring at the mildly surprised faces that peered at her through the glass. 

She thrust with magic this time and cracked the thickened pane. Only cracked. She should have had the strength to smash it entirely, but the gas, whatever it was, held too much sway over her. She had to stagger away, still more angry than afraid.

“Please, remain calm,” came a disembodied voice. “You are in no danger.”

Her last thought, before she lost thought entirely, was that they were abysmally poor liars.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art by thusspakekate.  
> Also, some of the dialogue in this chapter is taken directly from Thor: The Dark World - it should be obvious which.

**Midgard**

Darcy gave Jane a full four hours of disappearing from the sketchy abandoned train station with gravitational anomalies before she gave into panic and called the police.

Ian had been earnestly hovering around and trying to say without actually saying that she should call them for at least three of those hours. He couldn’t be blamed – he didn’t know Jane as well as Darcy did, and had not the slightest idea of how distracted she could get, nor how angry official involvement got her.

They were waiting by the car, which they couldn’t actually open because someone had thrown the keys into a magical sometimes-boomerang-effect-sometimes-not gravitational anomaly thingy, when Darcy noticed the iPod sitting in the cup holder.

Her first thought, after several hours of being fascinated by weird science magic stuff and then worrying about Jane and then worrying about how Jane would react to cops showing up, was _that’s weird, I don’t remember the intern pulling out his iPod_ because it certainly wasn’t hers and she knew Jane didn’t have one that new – 

“Oh, shit, oh shit shit shit.” She grabbed Ian’s coat, and as he stumbled backward, confused dismay on his face, she leaned in very intently and said, quite seriously, “We have to break into the car.”

To his credit, it took him only a moment’s confused glance through the window to realize what she was talking about.

“But – you’ve already called the cops!”

“So we have to hurry! Say we lost the keys and thought they were in the car or something, _Jane will kill me if we lose that._ ” Darcy was already casting about for something to break the window with. 

There was a small pile of bricks, probably left over from some abandoned construction effort, lying nearer to the building. She dashed to it and picked out two likely contenders, perhaps a little over aware of the immediacy of the situation.

It took a couple of tries, but eventually she and Ian got through the window, and she had just enough time to carefully hide the iPod in her pocket before the police showed up.

Then it was questioning, awkward explanations for the broken car window and their very presence in what was apparently actually private property and –

“Is that your friend over there?” said one of the officers, interrupting Darcy’s not-actually-feigned innocence due to ignorance act. She twisted around.

There was indeed a small, elegantly dressed scientist marching angrily towards them from the entrance.

“Jane!” shouted Darcy, running toward her. It wasn’t until now, full of relief at seeing her, that Darcy realized just how worried she’d been. “Where the hell were you?”

“Tell me you didn’t call the cops.”

It was perhaps not exactly a surprise that Jane’s first point of business was Darcy calling the police. But even she had to realize that disappearing for that long was bound to get them worried. “What was I supposed to do?” 

“Not call the cops?” Darcy stared at her as she went on, ranting about federal investigators and SHIELD interrupting her research again. Something didn’t add up. 

“Jane, you were gone for five hours.”

“… What?”

They stared at each other, and in the ensuing silence Darcy gestured over her shoulder to the car. “And they didn’t get the iPod, I took care of that. You might wanna apologize to your mom for what I did to the car though.”

Jane was barely paying attention, which would have miffed Darcy if she hadn’t also just been distracted by the realization that it was apparently pouring but neither of them were getting wet. “Uh…”

 _That’s weird_ she’d been intending to say, but Jane had caught sight of something behind her and shoved her science spectrometer thing at her before she could get it out. From the look on her face Darcy could guess what – or rather, who – it was even before she turned around.

There was something a little depressing about watching Jane reunite with the apparent love of her life. Maybe it was that Darcy was without such a partner. Maybe it was the rain that had started pounding down on her the moment Jane’s bubble of immunity had moved away.

Or maybe it was the fact that barely ten minutes later, Jane had disappeared with him through a shining magical space Viking pathway.

 

**Asgard**

In the cells beneath Asgard, Loki slept uneasily. He lay atop his bed covers, arms stiff at his sides, his eyebrows furrowed and jaw clenched. Sometimes his face twitched, spasmed, and once or twice he seemed almost about to cry out. But he never did. He was always completely silent as he slept.

Leah, watching, found him far more tolerable like this than she ever did otherwise.

“Is it true he’s a madman?”

The question was of course not addressed to her, but Leah turned anyway. Two guards had halted on their rounds past the cells, full of sleeping prisoners at this hour. They were all quite anonymous in their gear, the helmets hiding much of their faces, but one of them had slightly less familiar eyes and eyebrows than usual.

“A madman?” said the other, his voice a little disapproving. He moved restlessly, as if uncomfortable with the stop and eager to move on.

“I know what he did in Midgard, but I heard more than that. I heard he talks to things that aren’t there, that he has whole conversations with nothing.”

“I’ve seen him do it myself.”

The first guard shook his head, and let his partner lead them on. He looked back at the wall of Loki’s cell as they went past it, and Leah, without really thinking about it, became visible for a brief moment. She was gone again even before he’d had a chance to grab the other guard’s arm. Both of them looked her way warily, and she stared back at them, invisible. At last they moved on.

When she looked back at Loki, his eyes had opened. But for several long disconcerting seconds, she couldn’t tell if he was truly awake or not – his eyes were wide, but unseeing, fixed on some point beyond the ceiling he faced. She drew closer to the window of his cell, and let herself become visible to him. He’d congratulated her before on the complicated nature of this, but she found it was not a hard trick to be visible to only one person, not when she was so ephemeral in being.

She could almost exactly pinpoint when he registered her presence, for his body immediately relaxed.

“Do you not sleep, little weed?” He asked it without actually looking at her. She felt a faint twinge of annoyance every time he called her that, but he had never yet asked for her name and she would not do him the courtesy of offering it.

“Never.”

He twisted on the bedcovers so that he could look at her while lying on his side. He did not seem very old sometimes, certainly not as old as the Loki that had existed before the child version Leah had known. 

“Useful, in a watchdog,” he told her. “Were you crafted as such, or did Frigga make you so?”

She considered saying “yes,” just to annoy him, but saying nothing was easier, and potentially less likely to earn one of his irritatingly nasty retorts.

After a moment of silence he sat up, lithe and collected. “I wonder why you come out at all, when you’re so uninterested in conversation,” he said, back to her as he stood. “Would you not be a better guard if you never let me see you at all? Then I could never know when you are watching.”

“I’m not a guard,” she said.

“No, you are only a slave.”

She could hear the sneer in his voice as he said it, and just for that she hid herself again when he turned to look over his shoulder at her. His face went blank and he turned it to the front of the cell once more, exhaling. She did not reveal herself again, and he said nothing else for quite some time.

 

After a long night of carousing and drinking, Volstagg nevertheless seemed perfectly able, with some mild protest and complaint, to set out with Fandral in the morning to collect more prisoners from Vanaheim. His children bid him a sleepy farewell. Loki, who had lain awake many hours in his too-soft bed, desperately missing the solitude of his tower and his Starkphone, bid him an even sleepier one. But he forced himself to stay awake now that it was daytime. He could not stand the thought of wasting a chance to explore this Asgard and its fantastically bizarre sky.

Before he left, he considered the benefits of slipping away unseen vs requesting proper permission. In the end he went with the latter. After all, it would not do to seem more untrustworthy than necessary so soon after Volstagg and family had taken him in.

“Good day, good lady, I’m off,” he chirped to Gudrun as she puttered about at the beginning of her day’s duties.

“You’re not,” she said, without looking up.

Loki, who’d almost been out the door at that point, skidded to a stop. “Er. I’m not?”

And so he discovered that the first part of any noble Asgardian child’s day was given over to lessons at the knee of a tutor. Volstagg and Gudrun had graciously decided to include him among the pupils of the tutor they employed for their own children, and faced with such hospitality he could not very well refuse it. Besides, hadn't he wanted to come to Asgard? What wonderful opportunities this presented! He had to remind himself of all these things to stop himself from explaining at length that he learned much better at his own pace.

He was asked a series of questions by the tutor in question, a severe looking man who was quite unimpressed by the feeble knowledge he displayed. 

“We were a very isolated family!” he protested. “Mother and Father did not believe in much education…”

This excuse, he felt, was quite a good one. It could account for so many things, including how he came across a dangerous magical book and used its curses out of play, when any sensible child should have learned to be careful about that sort of thing. But it also, unfortunately, meant he could not display any particular aptitude for those things universal to studying, maths and such, which he had in his own world long studied for himself.

The tutor was not particularly convinced by his excuses, and set him to study with the younger children. This of course included Hilde, who made the experience rather more tolerable by exchanging outrageous faces with him behind the instructor’s back.

The material itself was actually interesting. It was worth even the confinement to Gudrun’s kitchen to have a chance to learn some of the history and nature of the universe he was to all appearances stuck in, at least for the time being.

Dwelling on thoughts of that sort had been a major source of his wakefulness the night before. The all-encompassing dread at the knowledge of what had to be done to stop Mephisto, and the incredible, crushing relief of realizing it was not only impossible now, but unnecessary, had faded away into a strange, nightmare memory, bizarre and difficult to comprehend in its gravity. All he had now was the aching knowledge that he was far away from Thor who loved him, the All-Mother who trusted him, and Leah, his best and only friend.

By the time the lessons were finished, Loki was drooping with the effort of remaining awake after a night of terribly scarce sleep, and a wretchedly full few days preceding it, without even the benefit of caffeinated beverages. Gudrun, with a motherly look that he’d never seen directed his way before, asked if he’d like some rest. 

“Er,” he said, a little offset by her concern. “I’m quite, um,” 

“No he _doesn’t_ , he’s going to come with us.” That was Hilde, saving him from an embarrassing lack of words. Her brothers behind her, both older than her, gave Loki mildly embarrassed grimaces on her behalf.

Her mother turned a severe eye on her, no doubt ready to scold her for bothering him, but Loki was quick to reassure her that yes, indeed, he was going to go with them, and they’d all be very merry together! Hilde’s quick attachment to him – all the children’s, really – was an advantage he was not in a hurry to jeopardize. 

They led him up the streets to their favourite place to play. It was a small square courtyard, all smooth stone bordered on two sides by high stone walls and on one by a wizened old tree. There were other children gathered in its centre, already kicking around a ball. Most were younger than Loki, and after a short period of time spent joining in with them he quietly asked Volstagg’s eldest son, Alaric, why that was.

“The older ones are all already in training,” he said. “You will go soon, too! Once you’re ready, I expect.”

It shouldn’t have, but the easy assumption of his continued presence and eventual growing to adulthood here in this strange Asgard, as a child among Volstagg’s brood, startled Loki. With the Fear Crown safely hidden away here, he had almost subconsciously decided to start looking for ways home, but even if that were not possible (as he feared), he could no more imagine himself living a placid, standard Asgardian soldier’s life than he could imagine Thor becoming the god of calm, careful thinking and diplomacy. 

Misinterpreting whatever look was crossing Loki’s face, Alaric hurried to reassure him. “I’m sure it won’t be long. You’re quick, you know, you might even be ready before me!”

Loki said he was flattered, and that he hoped they might enter the training ranks together, and melted away from the gang of laughing children into the shadow of one of the high walls. He sat there awhile, hands around his knees and eyes focused vaguely on the tree at the other side of the square as he thought. No, he could not stay here long enough to enter the ranks of Asgardian soldiers. He didn’t need a lecture from Ikol to know that such a pedestrian fate was not in the nature of Loki.

Perhaps it was because he was thinking of Ikol that he noticed a pair of bright eyes and a large, birdlike shape in the shadows of the tree, hopping from one branch to another. He blinked at it, certain it was looking straight at him.

Hilde plopped herself down next to him, looking at him intently. “Are you bored?” 

He stifled a yawn, partly (mostly) for the effect, and said, “May the thought perish! To be bored is not within my nature.”

“Hmmm.” She looked over at the centre of the square, where the other children still played. One of her brothers seemed to be beginning an argument.

“Well, I am,” she said. “We always have to go and play with _their_ friends, because I’m younger, and they always play such stupid games because they’re all stupid boys.”

That, he hadn’t noticed, but it was true. She was the only girl there.

“You’re not so bad,” she reassured him. “I know you’re not silly like them.”

“I’m very gratified!” He really was, in fact. He was not at all used to being the target of such favour – he and the other Hilde, not to mention the rest of Volstagg’s brood in the Asgardia he knew, had gotten on well enough, but they’d always stayed a little distant. Not only were they younger, they knew well the unease with which their father and all the other adults regarded him. And Leah, his BFF – he cut away from that thought before it hurt him.

“Let’s go,” said Hilde. The boys in the centre of the square were all arguing in earnest now, game forgotten.

“Alright!” Loki jumped to his feet and looked about purposefully. “Er, did you have an idea to where?”

“Of course!” But she didn’t elaborate. She only led them out of the square, clearly expecting him to follow. Which he did.

 

The infirmary, like everything else in Asgard, was both strange and beautiful. It made Jane think of ancient cathedrals or palaces on Earth, with its smooth walls and high ceilings. Yet there was a comforting warmth to it, a lack of the professional, detached sterility that was so common to the Earth hospitals she’d had experience with. As she waited for them to prepare a room in which to test her, still struggling to shake the impression that the past several hours had been some bizarre dream, or nightmare, Jane finally had a chance to speak to Thor about what she had been doing before he came for her.

Thor first wanted to know where she had gone during the time that Heimdall could not see her. She had by now come to understand that, though unable to visit her or contact her himself, Thor had frequently asked Heimdall about her doings and well-being. She had considered being creeped out by the revelation that a faraway god had been reporting on her actions while she was completely unaware of him, but Thor assured her that Heimdall was courteous and respectful of privacy. She decided to find it touching instead.

She told him everything she could recall of her investigation of the gravitational anomaly, of the strange place she had been pulled down into, and the substance that had entered her. And then she told him of what had happened before that (omitting, a little guiltily, everything about Richard), the first anomaly she had been trying to search out and the Asgardian girl that had appeared in London and been taken by SHIELD operatives.

Thor frowned. “An Asgardian child?”

“It’s what he said. He gave me a recording, with her voice on it, but – oh, shit.” She suffered a moment of blind panic before she remembered Darcy saying something about making sure the iPod was safe.

“What is it?” 

“Nothing, I just… the recording’s with Darcy. Apparently the girl said she was from Asgard, and the guy I spoke to said she was just a kid.”

The door opened, and a technician stepped out. “We’re ready for you now,” she said.

“I have not heard of any missing children,” Thor said as they followed her in. “I will ask my father if he knows of anything.”

 

There was, for once, an event. The guards marched a troop of prisoners down the staircase, past Loki’s cell. He stood in the corner watching them with a faint smile, his hands behind his back. “More friends,” he commented. “Odin is so kind to send them.” He turned his head a little without looking round, and added. “I did get yours, by the way.”

“I’m glad,” said Frigga’s simulacrum. “The books I sent, they don’t interest you?”

He sighed silently, and turned his back to the parade outside. Ignoring the question about the books, he continued in a bright voice, “She’s so entertaining, I almost forget the hole I’ve been locked away and forgotten in.”

Frigga’s face fell a little. “Loki, you know full well it was your own actions that brought you here.”

He smirked. “My actions? I was only giving truth to the lie I’d been told my entire life. That I was born to be a king.”

Frigga’s face was very grave, the same face she had worn when lecturing him on poor behaviour as a child. It twisted something in him to see it, even before she began to speak. He looked beyond her, to where the girl had reappeared again, watching the two of them.

“A true king,” Frigga began to say in her low, serious voice, but Loki cut in.

“And what of a true queen? She binds children to her service, to entertain her husband’s prisoners? To absolve you of feeling guilty for locking away a man you once named as son?”

The girl rolled her eyes. Frigga did not look around, though her eyelids flickered. “I still name you as my son,” she said.

He sneered. He wanted to say something cutting in response, some reference to Thor and Odin’s easy relinquishment of their bonds to him, but the girl was watching and it was too much of an admittance to show how much it – angered him. 

“As for the child,” continued Frigga, and now she did turn to give her a glance. “Things are not as simple as they appear.”

“No, of course not. Children always do serve so well as tools for some complex, unknowable purpose. It is some clever gambit of Odin’s, I don’t doubt. He is so full of them.”

“Your father – ” began Frigga, her voice steady, and he forgot the girl, forgot everything but the appalling gall of those two words.

_”He’s not my father!”_

Frigga went silent a moment. “Then am I not your mother?”

He stared at her, suddenly at a loss. There was only one answer to give, but it hurt to say it. “You’re not.”

She gasped, a quick little intake of breath as if he’d stabbed her. She tried to smile, and he wanted, desperately, to retract the statement, true as it was. He could only shake his head and reach out his hands to her.

They went through the simulacrum. He had forgotten, in the heat of emotion, that it was not truly Frigga that stood there.

“Always so perceptive,” she said as her body flared away, “About everyone but yourself.”

He swallowed.

The girl had not disappeared. “That was cruel,” she said. “And pointless.”

He glared at her. When his mother’s image had first appeared, he’d intended to learn more from her about this girl she’d saddled him with. Damn Frigga for always preventing things from going as planned. 

“Come now, Loki,” she said, for once initiating conversation, “You were just complaining earlier that I never talk. Yet now I’m here, and you are silent.”

“Oh, I think I’ve had my fill for today.” His voice was far more pleasant than he felt.

“Hmm, that’s unfortunate.” She sat herself down, as she’d done before, arms around knees and chin in hands. 

He approached her, staring down from behind the magical barrier. Looking up at him, she said frankly, “That was the most entertainment I’ve yet had here. I was hoping for more.”

He should have laughed, but the bubbling emotions left over from the confrontation with Frigga was more easily translated into rage and maliciousness than amusement. “You’re lucky that I cannot reach you,” he said instead, smiling unpleasantly. “I’m sure I could be very entertaining.”

She only stared at him. “You don’t have very many friends, do you?”

Curse it. 

“Why, I have you, do I not?” he said with false gaiety, forcing down the nastiness. 

The words had more effect than he’d anticipated – her mouth twisted suddenly, and her eyes narrowed. Then she said, “Only because of your mother.”

“Yes. Since you’re in such a talkative mood, I do invite you to say more on the topic.” He meant for her to explain more about the ‘complexities’ that Frigga had mentioned, but he said it without really expecting anything. 

“You’re lucky,” she said. “That she still cares.”

He had begun pacing along the sides of the cell, but this made him stop. “I’m aware,” he said tersely. 

She didn’t say anything else, but when he looked back out she was still there, watching him. He pointedly turned his back on her, his gaze falling on the books that still lay against the wall. He went to the pile and picked one out at random, and sat down upon the bed with it. He was not looking whenever it was that she blinked away again.


	6. Chapter 6

**Earth**

Leah woke.

Having never really slept before – though she’d dozed, in a fashion, dreaming through much of the eons after she had served the purpose she had been conceived for – she found it an extremely disorienting experience. She had been unaware of all about her for an indeterminate length of time, and now she was not.

Her back was against some flat, smooth surface, her neck and body, arms and legs all rigidly bound to it. She could feel things poking at her skin, wires and so on. 

After a moment she opened her eyes. There was a bright light straight above her, and small movements beside her.

“Ah, you are awake.”

An unfamiliar voice. Not the man who’d spoken to her before. She looked at him from the side of her eye, unable to turn her head. He was hazy, unfocused on the edge of her vision, a vague pink and white blob.

“You will be finding you have no access to the little… powers you displayed earlier. We’ve taken care of them for the time being.”

She had not been aware of any diminishment in strength, only a wooziness left over from sleep, but she thought it probably best not to test it. She found she could not speak to ask him how they had administered the drug they’d given her, as she was gagged. It didn’t matter, anyway, as after informing her that her ‘powers’ as he called them were gone, the man began speaking over her to someone else. It seemed that once he’d informed her of her total helplessness, he had no interest in anything else about her as a person.

Leah heard only snatches of the conversation that was conducted above her head – something about limitations, flesh density, and so on – because she had suddenly realized that she was not wearing her dress. She wore instead some vague approximation of underwear that she certainly did not recall ever choosing to wear.

The realization that while she was unconscious someone had stripped and re-clothed her, then bound her to this table, was a painful, humiliating shock. She was nearly overcome with rage. 

But she swallowed it down. If she tried and failed to throw them off her now, what would come next could only be worse. She would have to wait, and watch. She could do it. She had been patient before, when waiting to enact revenge.

 

**Asgard**

Frigga found her husband as he left the dungeons. No, not the dungeons – the protected room in which he kept those items which he sought to learn more about, like the strange crown brought by the child from Vanaheim, was along a hallway adjacent to the one leading to the dungeons. The path he walked could lead from either. She remembered that quickly enough that the burst of hope for an attempted reconciliation between him and their youngest son quashed itself almost before she realized it.

He turned to her, his face severe, and she swallowed hope and disappointment both and summoned a look of vague reprimand. “You didn’t tell me that Thor had brought Jane here to meet us.” 

“I did not,” said Odin brusquely. “For he hasn’t. The girl is not only his mortal now, she carries an ancient weapon with her.”

Frigga dropped the teasing smile from her face and came closer. “A weapon?” 

“The Aether, of the Dark Elves.” This he said quietly, though they were alone.

Frigga allowed herself a quick intake of breath. That was too much. The Aether, found, just before the convergence of the realms? It could not be a coincidence. And Odin, it seemed, was of like mind.

“The crown,” said Frigga. “Is it connected?”

“I cannot tell.” Odin began to walk again, and she fell into step with him as he led the way back toward the main halls of the palace. “It is no Infinity Stone, but its nature is difficult to describe. I am not sure of how it would be used.”

She knew her husband well enough that she did not ask for reassurance that he did not intend to ever use it, even if he were to know how. That was not what troubled her about the crown, or the boy who’d brought it, anyway.

“And Jane. Will she be alright?”

“She is mortal,” said Odin, voice heavy, and Frigga understood. No mortal was built to withstand the power within the Aether.

“There must be something we can do,” she said, her heart aching for Thor and the mortal both.

“There are no records of how it may be removed.”

“There must be a first for everything,” countered Frigga, and the look he gave her as they separated was weary and full of fondness. 

 

Hilde took Loki on a long, winding route through side streets and alleys, coming out on a small wharf overlooking the expanse of water before the palace. It was an impressive view, the palace huge in perspective, the mountains behind it terribly imposing. The main road that led through the city’s centre and into the palace, which Loki and Volstagg had so hastily ridden in on only the day before, was farther off to their left. It was, felt Loki, an extremely instragrammable moment, which made his lack of Starkphone (and, in all likelihood, any internet connection) particularly upsetting.

The two of them sat, their feet almost reaching the water as they dangled.

“This is my favourite spot,” said Hilde, voice full of pride. “I found it myself, and no one else knows it.”

“Aside from whoever owns those boat-type things over there,” said Loki, pointing.

“No one important knows it,” she amended.

“You never worry you will lose your way?”

“No. Besides, if I were missing very long, my Daddy could just go to Thor who would just ask Heimdall where I was, and then come get me.” She said all this quite breezily, and then pointed. “I’ve a friend’s house over there, but it’s too far to go by foot. That’s the other reason I have to go with my brothers everywhere.”

They stared out over the water, both quiet for a time. Across the water, among the great columns at the entrance to the palace, distant figures moved about. It was hard to see from here, but Loki thought he could recognize the bright red of Thor’s cloak.

“I’m glad…” began Hilde, but she trailed off, frowning, as the figures among the columns began moving more quickly and a loud beeping noise rolled across the water toward them. She stood, as if that would give her a better view, and Loki looked over at her.

“Shall I assume that is not a common occurrence?” he said, also standing.

“Yes,” she said. She bit her lip, looking quite worried. “That’s the alarm for the prisons.”

“Which would mean…”

“Someone’s escaping. It’s probably Loki. Come on, we should go.”

He followed her, obedient, but couldn’t resist looking over his shoulder again. If it were any other situation, he might have wanted to stay and watch, to see for himself what was happening, but he had no wish to run into the Loki of this world.

 

As the alarm blared though the prison, Loki slowly approached the wall of his cell. There was chaos in the halls, prisoners arming themselves with the weapons of dead guards as a huge, masked figure smashed the magic borders of their cells with raw strength.

The figure seemed to burn from within, every movement heavy with purpose. An inside man, obviously, come to stir up a distraction while some other threat approached, unanticipated. Asgard’s watchers had grown poor indeed if something this obviously dangerous had been so easily brought in.

Loki watched him, considering the opportunities, their risks and benefits. The girl was invisible, unsurprisingly. Perhaps she was even truly absent, reporting to Frigga about the danger - _Frigga_. 

Before Loki’s cell the behemoth halted, his gaze catching on Loki’s. Loki grinned at him. _Go on. Set me free. See what happens if you do._

It seemed a long moment before the behemoth turned away, making for the stairs. That he’d made no move to free him wasn’t even really a disappointment. 

Loki called after him as he went, before he could think better of it. “You may want to take the path to the right.”

The figure paused and gave him a look over the shoulder, an acknowledgement, and then was on his way. 

Loki watched him go, resisting the urge to grimace. He had spoiled his chance. If he’d hoped to aid the monster, he should have sent it up the stairs to the left, where the heart of Asgard’s defenses lay – to the right there was only a long hall to an inescapable room. On an impulse, a burst of childish concern, he’d just helped to make impotent a truly useful threat to Asgard. It was almost as annoying as it was embarrassing.

“Why the path to the right?” The girl had appeared just at the corner of his cell, back to him. 

He glanced at her. So she hadn’t been reporting to Frigga at all. His voice was soft and bitter as he replied, “Oh, I don’t know, why don’t we find out?” 

 

They were not even halfway back to the courtyard where they’d left the other children when the first explosion occurred. Hilde screamed and fell to the ground, hands over her head, though it was nowhere near. 

“We’re being attacked!” she shouted. “Asgard’s under attack!” 

It was quite unnecessary, as the other explosions and quickly approaching ships made that clear enough and there was besides no one aside from the two of them in the alley they were in anyway.

Loki, who had also jumped to the ground, shielded his eyes to watch the ships approaching. “Is that uncommon?”

“Uncommon?!” She had stood now, and was staring at him, wild eyed. “Asgard has not been under attack in centuries!”

“Truly? I have terrible timing.” 

The ships had gone past them, followed by the ratatat of fire from Asgardian gun outposts.

“They’re going to the palace,” Hilde said, voice full of worry. Loki frowned. Somehow, it seemed unlikely that if this were the other Loki’s bid for escape he would have outside help. Loki works best alone, ever toward his own ends, after all. Whatever was happening in the prison was more likely to be associated with this attack than with Loki, then, wasn’t it?

Even from here they could see the golden, shimmering shields rising around the palace. They both watched, unable to look away, as the ship approached closer and closer, only to bounce off the shields as they raised themselves just in time.

Then Hilde grabbed Loki’s arm, fairly yanking it as she began running again. “Come on! We have to get back to the others!”

 

The shields held firm. It was something of a surprise – faithful Algrim had never before failed Malekith. But he could not afford to wait. The Aether was calling to him from behind that barrier, and the Asgardians’ guns were unrelenting.

He tapped the communications tab, broadcasting his face and voice to all of the ships in the city.

“Leave the palace. Target all those Asgardians not within the shields. We will kill their people until they relent, and give back what is ours.”

 

Loki and Hilde were on a main street, filled with other fleeing citizens, when a ship downed by Asgardian fire fell nearly on top of them. By the time they’d pulled themselves up from where they’d fallen, coughing on the smoke from the wreck, there were already figures exiting the ship. They did so unhurriedly, as if they had meant to land the ship here all along, and then as the Asgardians struggled to stand they calmly, deliberately began to kill them.

Loki and Hilde were far enough away that they were not in the first line of defenseless victims. It was Loki’s turn to lead now, pulling her away as quickly as possible. Hilde was staring, huge eyed, at the pointless murdering. These were not Asgard’s warriors, though most still had some martial skill – but they were without weapons, and not prepared for attack in the unassailable ruling realm. It was sheer butchery.

“Look away,” Loki whispered, mouth at her ear. 

She tore her gaze away, and the two of them managed to get behind the corner of a building. It led on to another side street, the next part of her route back to the courtyard, but they dared not leave this tiny point of shelter. For a few moments, as the Asgardians in the street behind them died, and their killers came ever closer to their hiding spot, Loki considered what to do. 

He looked at Hilde. Her face was quite blank, eyes still wide. She was looking in the direction of the street where the creatures were finishing their slaughter, no longer able to see it but obviously still hearing it. She didn’t look as though she had any idea where to go from here, which was probably to be expected from a child who had never seen war firsthand. 

From the corner of his eye he saw a large black bird alight on a rooftop. Loki sighed and pulled Hilde close. “I’ve an idea. I’m going to go one way, you’re going to go another. That way,” and he pointed up the side street along the route that would take her back to the courtyard, and from there her parents’ house, “is your way. Don’t wait for me.”

“But you don’t know the city.” 

“I said, I have an idea!” He turned her about and gave her a tiny push. She stumbled forward, and then looked back at him fearfully.

“Trust me,” he said, and he made sure to look beyond her at the raven as he said it.

Then, as she began running, sticking close to the wall to stay out of view of the main street, Loki took a breath and strolled back around the corner. 

The weirdly masked figures didn’t see him at first, so he cupped his hands around his mouth and called out to them, “Hail, strange creatures!”

As one, they turned toward them, weapons raised. He continued, well aware they might decide to kill him at any moment. “If you wish to enter the palace, I have the means to assist you!”

There was a pause. The only Asgardians left in this street were dead, and so it was only Loki and the figures. The – elves? Their ears seemed pointed.

They didn’t seem to be shooting him yet, so he came closer with his hands raised, stepping gingerly over corpses. “Entrance to the palace is indeed what you intend, yes? I’ve a faster way to get there than… whatever you’re doing here.”

One of the figures came forward and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, pulling him up. “How?”

Loki thrashed, gasping. “Well I – ack, I can’t tell _you._ You’ll just kill me and take the credit. Who’s in charge of things here?”

This was all possibly a really, really stupid move, but it was what Loki had and he was going with it. And, surprisingly, it seemed to be working. Another figure was emerging from the bowels of the ship, a figure with pale skin and hair and an unmasked face. 

“Malekith,” said the one holding Loki. “This one speaks of a way in to the palace.”

_Malekith?_

Alright, that had not been one of the possibilities Loki had considered. He tried to prevent his surprise from showing too much as the Dark Elf, the cruel Malekith, turned his gaze on him.

“You are a child,” he said, doubt and disgust evident in his voice. An elf beside him shifted his hand on his weapon.

“In appearance!” agreed Loki. His mind was racing. “But in fact, no. I’m just borrowing this form for awhile, that’s all.”

Malekith looked at the elf holding him, and it lowered him slowly to the ground. Loki held his hands out, palm up, the crooked little villain smile he’d long since perfected playing about his lips. He was aware he had only moments to satisfy the scepticism with which he was being regarded. “That’s much better. Malekith! I have heard your name before. I am no child, though it is surprisingly easy to gain entrance to the Realm Eternal when the Asgardians believe you one.”

There was an impatient shifting, and Loki hurried on. “I bear a grudge against them, you see, and I think the goals of you and I could quite easily align. I have given them a weapon, for safekeeping they believe, but it is in truth already active and working to destroy them.”

Farfetched? Almost as much so as the story he’d given Odin of the Fear Crown’s origin. But when lying you must never allow doubt of the believability of your story to show. 

“This does not offer me a route past the palace’s barriers,” said Malekith. He didn’t seem at all convinced.

“Not as yet! But one of the first things this weapon will do is weaken their defenses, in one particular point. I could lead you there, if you would do but one thing for me…” he paused a moment, glancing fairly obviously behind him to ensure that the raven was indeed still with him, close enough to hear his words as it perched some small distance away in a tree beside the building. “Capture – not kill! I’ve need for it – the spying raven that Odin has set to watch over my doings.”

As soon as he said this, Huginn (or perhaps Muginn) took off from the tree, beating its wings away from the elves and their weapons. A few of them tried nonetheless to shoot it down, but it was too quick for them.

Loki winced in feigned disappointment. “Ah.”

Malekith’s expression had not changed, though he followed the bird’s path with his eyes. “Show us the weakness, then,” he said. “And we will bring you your spy when we are done.”

Loki raised his eyebrows. He’d rather hoped they’d chase after it for a bit, waste a little more time trying to capture it, but he would have to make do.

“As you wish,” he said, shrugging. “I’ll lead, shall I?”

 

In the bowels of the palace, the last of the Kursed reached the end of the passage and stood before a locked door. It was without ornamentation and without guard, yet he could feel a pulse of energy from it, or perhaps from behind it.

It was simple work to smash it open with his hands, the magic turning brittle under his touch as the barriers in the prison had done. When the shards fell away he stepped through into a simple, bare stone chamber, almost totally empty but for the small plinth in its centre, ringed with runes. On this there rested a small object. A strange crown that pulsed with a sickly energy.

He stepped toward it – and found that his movements were sluggish, weighted and slow. He tried to turn, but found he could not do even that. Some strange spell had been sleeping in this room, a confining, constricting protection that could not be fought with strength.

Still he tried, stumbling on against the resistance. He reached for the object of power on the plinth, and it seemed almost to help him, to pull him towards it. He managed to take it in one hand and for a brief moment the spell seemed driven away. 

With the crown in one hand he brought his other down with wicked force upon the plinth, judging it to be the source of the confining spell. It shuddered and cracked under the blow. 

There was a shrieking noise and the pressure of the confining spell fell upon him again, briefly intense. He could not move at all, not even to shout, yet there was something happening nonetheless. The thing in his hand – did it bear a child’s face? - seemed to pulse and he felt a tug within his abdomen.

All who had long enough memories knew of the alignment of worlds, of how portals opened and shut at random as the realms grew nearer and nearer. This felt like the opening of a portal, of the dangerous, giddy travel between worlds they facilitated, but no normally developed one. Something helped along by whatever power was within the crown?

Beneath his outstretched arm the plinth was crumbling, and the floor and walls with it. The pressure of the confining spell had disappeared. But he could not see whatever else followed, for the portal tugged at him and the burning Kursed, who had once been Algrim, was pulled through to whatever lay on its other side.

 

Far above, Odin felt the surge of power as the room that had safely held his studied artefacts and weapons for millennia was destroyed. It crackled through the palace, creating small fissures in the stone, interrupting, if only briefly, long set barrier spells and other magics. For a moment, just the barest moment, even the shields that kept the core of Asgard safe from the intruders flickered and failed.

 

Jane was against the wall as it shuddered, leaning with her forehead against cool stone in an attempt to stave off the vaguely ill feeling she had. She stepped away as it trembled, staring at it wide eyed, and wrapped her arms about herself instead. 

_”Loki,”_ Thor had said when the alarm first sounded, but Jane had already known that he was wrong. It was not Loki that would come for the thing that had taken possession of her body.

The palace became still once more and she took in a breath, trying to calm herself. Thor’s mother had led her to a small – by Asgardian standards – secret chamber off the queen’s rooms. She was safe here, and utterly powerless. Whatever was happening out there was happening because of her presence, because of this pulsing thing that ran through her veins, roaring in her ears and tickling at her eyes. 

“Get a grip on yourself,” she whispered, rubbing her arms through the elegant Asgardian dress she had been given. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe this was just Loki trying to make an escape attempt, or maybe it was something else entirely unrelated to either the mysterious Aether or Loki. Any scientist knew that correlation didn’t necessarily mean causation. She had to remind herself of that.

She wanted to sit with her back against the wall again, but she dared not. If something, or someone, got past Frigga and came for her after all, it could only be worse to be on the ground when it arrived.

So instead she stood still in the centre of the room, arms folded protectively around her torso, feeling horribly out of her element.

 

“It’s lucky for you I came along! Your other plan was quite poor, if you do forgive me saying so. Kill people until they let you in? It would take far too long, the All-Father would never fall for that sort of blackmail and besides, he has soldiers of his own. No, you’d have been killed or chased off long before you got to whatever you’re getting to.”

Loki was quite obnoxiously chatty between giving directions to Malekith and his men through the skies. Another ship had come to gather them up after Loki had elected to assist them. The heavy hand of an elf holding the back of his neck was no obstacle to this – it was even less of a dissuasion than the utter lack of response, positive or negative, from any of the elves to his comments. They were quite disconcerting, Malekith especially. The others could be forgiven their blank expressions as, indeed, all that could be seen of their faces were masks.

He noticed Malekith give the elf holding his neck a significant look, and there was a bit more pressure in the grip, making him wince. 

“We are close!” he asserted. Part of the problem, of course, was that they had to avoid the Asgardians’ guns. Loki had tried very hard to make sure most of his directions were nearly impossible to follow without being hit, but these elves were absurdly good fliers and their ships stupidly agile.

Well. He’d done what he could. Ikol would have been calling him an idiot for how spectacularly this plan, such as it was, had failed. He’d only really meant to distract them from finding Hilde, and then to prevent them from killing him. If he was lucky, they’d crash into the barrier hard enough to cause irreversible damage to the ship, and maybe he could escape in the chaos of the fall.

“There,” he said, pointing at a random part of the palace, the grand open hall lined with pillars that he and Hilde had been looking at so very little time ago. He hoped she’d at least managed to get back to her family alright, and that they were safe. If he was about to probably die in an enemy fighter, it would be nice if he could at least think of it as a sacrifice done in the service of saving somebody and not some completely useless endeavour.

“There is no weakness there,” said Malekith.

“That’s what you’re meant to think,” said Loki. “My weapon’s a very subtle device.”

Still the elves hesitated, dodging Asgardian fire.

“Look,” said Loki, “You’ve been following me this far. Wouldn’t it be stupid to stop now? I’d be a pretty great fool if I led you here without telling the truth about the shields.”

Malekith gazed through the ship’s strange high-tech equivalent of a windshield. “Do as he says,” he said at last. 

The ship plunged. Loki sighed, waiting for them to crash into the barrier. 

They didn’t. A moment before they would have hit, the barrier shone suddenly overbright and then disappeared. They sailed through, and it shut itself behind them.

Loki was extremely glad no one was looking at his face.

Thankfully, he was not so busy being shocked that he missed the look that passed between Malekith and the elf holding him. He was already twisting his body away when the blade plunged at him, and instead of sliding between his ribs it skated across them. He gasped in pain – whatever the materials were, they _burned_ him as the knife slashed shallowly through cloth and flesh. 

The elf caught him in a firmer hold, pulling him close, and Loki managed to shout out “Betrayer! We had a deal, Malekith! Have you no honour?”

Malekith turned his bored gaze on him, but didn’t seem inclined to answer. Well, there went the “keep a conversation going to stave off imminent death” tactic – and then, to Loki’s luck at last, the ship smashed into the pillars of Asgard’s hall as it grounded itself. Despite the minimizing effects of the ship’s craftsmanship, the floor of the compartment they were within still tilted with the jolt and before the elf could get back to the business of murdering him in cold blood Loki had managed to offset his balance enough that his own considerable weight combined with the mild tilt to tip both him and the elf seeking to kill him into the pilot. 

One thing he’d noticed, in his many encounters with people wishing him ill, was that being small meant it was easier when there were more people going after you than one, because you could let them foul one another up while you slipped away. It was easier with large, beefy Asgardians or trolls than the lithe elves here, but the theory was the same, particularly in a small ship coming to a long, shuddering halt as it slid over the ground.

So – with much twisting and wiggling, and just the smallest expenditure of what little magic he knew to twist perspectives – his foes became each other’s murderers. He extracted himself from their bodies, wincing from the pain of his wound, to find himself alone in the ship. 

Outside the open door a battle was raging – Malekith must have wasted no time in leaving, despite the rather large amount of Asgardian soldiers waiting in the hall. Well, he had no time to waste. They had completely lost any element of surprise.

Loki, decided it was probably prudent to arm himself at this point. With a grimace, he ran his hands down the elves’ bodies, searching for whatever weapons they had that were not otherwise occupied. There was a knife in one belt, which he took, and a couple of small roundish objects hooked to another. He pulled out one and held it up to the light, frowning. Was it something like a Midgardian grenade? There didn’t seem to be a pull of any sort, but there was a button.

Thus armed, he crept to the doorway and peered out.

 

Malekith knew he was short on time. But the Aether’s presence pulsed in his skull, leading him to a chamber off the hall. Let his warriors deal with Asgard’s, and with the little boy who claimed he was no child – he had to take what he’d come for before the All-Father showed himself.

The room was not guarded. Good. He flung open its doors.

“Name yourself, creature.” The voice was arresting. It came from the elder of the two women in the room, a lady in elegant dress who bore a knife in one hand. But it was not she who interested him. The shrinking, doe-eyed girl who backed away in terror nearly glowed with the Aether’s power.

“I am Malekith,” he said. “And I have come for what is mine.”

He lunged toward the girl, no more time to spare for pleasantries – and the woman intercepted him, driving him back with a vicious blow. He caught himself before he fell and drew his own blade not a moment too soon, meeting her next slashing advance with a block.

But he realized, within moments, that he had overestimated himself. She whirled and struck with a strength and agility he would not have expected from a woman in such elegant court dress as her, and he had been long eons without true practise in battle. He should have brought a more powerful weapon than a single knife.

She had her knife pressed to his throat, his back to the wall, in mere moments, and for the first time he felt fear.

“Wait,” he said, playing for time. He meant to strike at her, unexpected, as she let him speak – but he never got the chance. She sliced his throat without waiting, and as the life flowed from his veins he felt more outrage and disbelief than fear.

She did not even look at him as he fell.


	7. Chapter 7

The being that had been Algrim fell through space and air, but not at random. He had been right when he thought the portal was no ordinary by-product of the alignment of realms. The artifact in his hand directed his fall, pulling him along the interdimensional path toward its closest kin – another being crafted from the mind of Loki.

 

 **Earth**  
Leah sat in darkness against the wall, one arm held awkwardly to her chest, hindered by the manacles about her wrists.

Shortly before the Loki who had created and befriended her had come into existence – well, relatively shortly before that – she had started paying attention to Loki. She knew already, had known in fact from the moment she formed as Cul’s kind nurse, that it was a different Loki from the one who would create her. But she was curious, anyway, about what sort of a person he was. 

The event that had made her stop watching was when he handed over a couple of Asgardians to the villain Doctor Doom to perform a surgical technique he described as vivisection. 

Well. Now she had a little bit of reference for what that was like. 

Her arm was covered in wounds. Only her arm – they had not moved on to her torso to examine her organs, yet. First they wanted samples of blood, simple muscle and skin tissue. She knew these things because she had listened to the terms they used, had watched with open, accusing eyes as they cut into her flesh.

It hadn’t seemed to bother them. They were meticulous in their excavation, recording the particulars of her body’s reactions and abnormalities in impersonal, professional tones. Their tools had been simple, human crafted steel, made sharp to be able to cut her skin. The wounds they made were quick to heal, though – they had already started scabbing over before they’d finished for the time and carted her away to this room. She’d considered testing her strength then, as they were transporting her, but she did not know where they were and there were so many guards about them. 

Loki, she reflected, probably would have tried to escape then anyway. The thought made her scowl. Whether he’d meant this to happen or not, her current situation was _his_ fault.

Now, against the wall of this smooth, empty room, aware she was almost certainly being watched, she discretely tested herself. The bindings were strong, difficult to break without an excessive and obvious use of force, but she did not _seem_ weaker that she could tell. Perhaps they had been wrong in their assumption whatever they’d done had successfully nullified her strength and powers. Well, they would have to have been – magic was no physical property to be blocked by injections and poisons, and she herself was a creature of story, no truly flesh and blood being. 

She still did not know where she was and she was aware she was being watched, but to wait longer was unacceptable. The wounds on her arms had healed into nothing but thin scars, and though the ache still remained she could handle that easily enough. She shut her eyes and pulled viciously at her restraints, ignoring the pain.

They held. Either they were stronger than the others, or whatever they’d done had indeed affected her strength.

She swore under her breath, and then, deciding caution was useless, blasted a crack in them with her magic. It was still taxing, but less so than outright shattering them, and she had pulled herself free and already begun crafting a portal when she heard alarms beginning to sound.

 

She had no way of knowing it, but they were not sounding for her. 

The few true SHIELD agents in the outpost had already been murdered by their HYDRA partners, to keep hidden the presence of the living test subject and the experiments beginning to be conducted on her, so it was HYDRA personnel only who witnessed the arrival of Algrim, last of Malekith’s Kursed.

Highly trained and impressively armed as they were, they were still only humans. He barely noticed the sting of their bullets. They could not even call for reinforcements as he smashed them and their facilities to pieces – they had cut themselves off from SHIELD and it would spoil much greater plans to call on a more overt military force for assistance.

Alrgim was halfway through demolishing the base, for no reason other than that he was lost and a being made entirely for destruction, now, when a green shimmer opened in the air before him and a girl tumbled out. 

She landed on her feet, poised for flight, and took in the sight of him – his huge height and burning eyes, and then her gaze caught and focused on the object he still clutched in his hand.

“I did not mean to come here,” she said, voice rather more serene than the circumstances called for. “I meant only to escape, but that – where did you get that?”

Algrim stared down at her. The building about them had caught fire, and there were bodies throughout the wreckage. She seemed to hardly notice all this.

“Asgard,” he said at last. “What is it to you?”

She blinked, but before she could say anything else a rattle of noise came and she jumped aside, ducking behind him to hide from a rain of bullets. 

“I would happy to tell you,” she said, quite conversationally, “If you would assist me in leaving this place.”

To be one of the Kursed was to burn in service to the king of the Dark Elves, virtually unstoppable in strength and durability. The humans’ weapons did little to him, but this crown in his hand was a thing of power, and had led him, he was sure, to the girl here. If she proved useless later, he could kill her, but for now…

He made no verbal response, only dipped his head briefly in agreement before he rounded again on the humans.

 

 **Asgard**  
It was perhaps a little insulting that none of the Dark Elves seemed to think it likely he could have escaped their murderous attempts, but Loki was too busy being grateful that no one bothered to check in his direction to get very indignant about it. He was more concerned that he couldn’t see Malekith anywhere on the field of battle.

He considered waiting it out in the ship, but he was worried about Malekith’s whereabouts. So he clambered out carefully, trying to ignore the pain in his side and hoping no errant shots or horrible miniature black holes (he’d managed to learn what the grenade things did in just a very few moments of observation) were heading his way. As he left, he caught sight of Sif’s familiar stern face. He would have flinched to hide himself, but she had already seen him – across several Asgardians and elves locked in battle, between dispatching one enemy and engaging with the next, she had still seen him! 

It was almost impressive.

He did the only thing he could – gave her a sheepish grin and then leaped off to the side to avoid being hit by a stray energy blast from one of the elves. He skirted around the ship at a crouched run, hand against his wounded side, well aware of the uselessness of his presence in an out and out fight. No one seemed to pay him any attention, Asgardians and elves both too busy with each other.

Outside the main circle of fighting, he pressed his back to an intact pillar and fingered the grenades. Was there anything he could do with them that wouldn’t likely make things worse? He’d sure made a fine mess of things here. He could just imagine Ikol’s sly approval at the chaos he’d inadvertently helped along.

“Loki! How did you get here?” The voice was very close, and very familiar, and he jumped in surprise then winced as it stretched his wound.

“Leah?!”

She was just a few feet away, in the green dress she always wore, frowning at him in confusion and – he could just barely see it – concern. She looked as though she’d been going somewhere and had caught sight of him and stopped while in the midst of movement, and even as he saw her she grimaced suddenly and went a few steps more away from him, still looking back over her shoulder.

“I’m in – you’re not – “ He scrambled for something to say, completely at a loss. How would _Leah_ be here? And in the middle of a battle! 

She shook her head suddenly, sharply, and turned resolutely to look where she was going – straight into an elf’s energy blast, it seemed. Loki stepped forward, shouting a warning, but she neither dodged nor put up a shield. She only vanished, leaving him gaping in confusion.

 

It was too late when Thor came rushing into his mother’s chambers. She was already wiping the bloody knife on Malekith’s clothes.

“Mother,” began Thor, halting his run as he entered the room. “You are… well?”

“I am,” she said. She nodded to the body. “That one was their leader. Malekith, he called himself.”

“The leader of the Dark Elves,” said Thor, as if that answered something for him. He gave her a vaguely surprised look of respect. “You subdued him?”

“I killed him,” said Frigga, giving him a little smile. “Have you forgotten that it was I who taught your brother to fight?”

She was in fact more rattled than her teasing showed. She was lucky Malekith – Malekith, of all people! – had come alone, and unprepared for a fight. 

Thor looked a little embarrassed. His gaze fell on the false Jane, still cowering against the wall, and he frowned. Frigga shut her eyes a moment, dismantling the spell that had projected the form of her son’s lover and the power signature of the Aether.

“Where is she?” asked Thor, brow smoothing in understanding as he watched the simulacrum melt away.

“Safe,” said Frigga. “And safe she will remain, for now.” She looked Thor over, noting the signs of struggle and exertion. “Are the prisoners subdued? What of the rest of the enemy, have they been dealt with? And where is your father?”

She did not ask after Loki. She had felt the pulse of power earlier, and feared she knew what it signified. It made her worry all the more about Odin’s whereabouts.

“The prisoners are taken care of,” Thor said. “As for the rest, I cannot say. Mother, I believe there are other intruders in the palace.”

“Go,” said Frigga, as she had before when the alarms first sounded. “I will be fine.” 

 

Sif sliced through the enemy, unable to spare much thought for the boy she’d seen exiting their ship. She could worry about his presence here, and whatever it might indicate for the safety of Volstagg’s family, when she wasn’t busy trying not to get killed.

Asgard would prevail this day. The intruders were outnumbered, and leaderless, and the longer the fighting went on the more obvious their lack of direction was. With the reinforcements Sif had brought it was only a matter of time before they were destroyed – and destroyed they had to be, as they gave no indication of being willing to surrender.

There was a momentary lull and she looked about her, panting. The dead elves outnumbered the living ones now, though they fought ferociously, but there were too many Asgardian dead on the ground. Where _was_ the intruders’ leader? He could not be among the dead here, they would not still be fighting if he were gone…

Thor entered the hall, hammer raised, and a little knot Sif had felt in her chest eased at the sight of him. Whatever nefarious deeds had been done this day, Thor was unharmed.

Yet he did not come to fight, as yet. Another change. Instead, his voice boomed over the hall. “Dark Elves! Stand down. Your leader, Malekith, is dead. Stand down and leave us now. You need not die here.”

 _Dark Elves?_ She had heard the term before, but never for a living people.

The intruders – the elves – paused momentarily in their fighting. Their eerie, masked faces gave nothing away.

And then they turned back to fighting, far more ferociously than before. 

Out of the corner of her eye, Sif saw movement – the child, Serrure, tossing something in Thor’s direction. 

“No!” she shouted, realizing what it had to be, and that she was too late already even as she raced toward Thor. 

The gravity bending hole opened up – not on Thor, but on three elves that had come about behind him. She had misjudged the arc of the throw.

Serrure turned a wide eyed gaze on her, and then grinned. She spared him a scowl before she turned back to the battle.

 

Outside of the palace, the troops of Dark Elves murdering their way through Asgard’s citizenry were beginning to notice that they had not been contacted by their leader in quite some time. The populace was not so defenseless anymore, either – as the shock of invasion wore off, they got off the streets and into magically protected houses and cellars, and the soldiers among them and about the streets were organizing themselves to be able to fight back.

In their separate groups, ship by ship, the elves decided to either go out fighting as their glorious brethren had done millennia ago in the first war against Asgard, or cut their losses and leave. Most left. 

Hilde, who had only managed to make it back to the empty courtyard where she had left her brothers (she would learn, later, that they had been able to take refuge in a friend’s house), had spent the rest of the battles that day hiding up the tree, staring out at the skies from behind the foliage. She watched as the ships left, fretting about what had become of Serrure.

Everyone was so busy fighting or hiding or trying to escape that no one spared any notice for the Asgardian skiffs. Even Heimdall did not think to look and notice that one was unaccounted for. But even if he had, it would not have mattered, for the skiff that had disappeared had been made invisible even to his eyes.

 

Jane tried to look nonchalant when Frigga came to release her from the hidden room. Her head felt better than it had before, but her skin seemed vaguely itchy. She set her arms flat against her sides to prevent herself from rubbing them.

So she seemed perfectly at ease as the door opened and Frigga, after a quick, assessing glance about the chamber, told her it was safe to come out – but she spoiled the image almost immediately.

“Is everything alright? Is Thor okay? What happened? Oh, my god.” She stopped in her tracks, staring in horror at the body sprawled before Frigga’s fountain.

The queen laid a gentle hand on her arm and steered her around. “Don’t worry,” she said, “Don’t look at it. There has been much fighting, but everything is alright now. You are safe.”

Jane tore her eyes away, with effort, and stopped again. In the doorway to the room stood Odin, decked out in his full armour, looking strangely weary.

She wasn’t sure of the etiquette here. Part of her felt an overwhelming urge to curtsy or something, due no doubt to how absurdly intimidating and regal he was, but he had been so rude and abrupt before, she was disinclined to show him excessive amounts of respect. She settled on holding his gaze with her own.

He looked away before her, to his wife, but it felt more like a dismissal than anything. “She is as she seems?” he asked Frigga.

“She is,” said Frigga. “None but she and I had entered that room.” 

Odin’s assessing, slightly disapproving gaze remained on Jane a moment longer, and then he seemed to reach a conclusion. 

“See to it she is not left alone,” he said. “I have other matters to attend to.”

He swept from the room. A raven, which Jane had not noticed before, followed him out. 

She looked to Frigga, confused. The queen looked suddenly worn.

“Is Thor alright?” It was the only thing she could think to say.

“Thor is fine,” said Frigga, and then in a somewhat wry tone, “It is my other son we are concerned about now.”

“Loki,” said Jane. A sense of numb terror flooded into her. “So he was part of it after all.”

“No,” said Frigga. “At least, I do not believe he was. But during the attack, something managed to disrupt, very briefly, all the shielding spells throughout the palace. Odin went to the dungeons as soon as he realized it, but…”

“Loki had already escaped.” She started suddenly, realizing what Odin had been asking. “You thought he’d come for me! For the Aether, I mean.”

“It did seem a possibility, though he should not have been able to know about it,” said Frigga, a little distantly. She almost seemed like she was going to say something else, but she shook her head instead and gave Jane a smile. “You needn’t worry. Loki is… probably long gone by now. Come, let us find Thor.”

 

Sif had lost track of Serrure by the time they’d finished dealing with the Elves, and it was something of a surprise to stumble across his prostrate form leaning up against a pillar. His eyes were shut and his hand was to his side, which she saw was bleeding sluggishly from some injury – from one of the Elves’ knives, she guessed, as they had been wickedly sharp and crafted of powerful metals. She leaned down to shake his shoulder and he gasped, hand fumbling at his side where, she saw, he carried two more of the black hole creating weapons.

She grabbed his wrist firmly. “No need for that,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

He blinked at her. “Is it over then?” he said faintly, as if from far away. “Oh, that’s good…”

“It is not wise to sleep on a battlefield. Not even the edge of one. But you haven’t answered my question – how did you get here?”

“I, uh, I caught a… I caught a ride with some Dark Elves. It was very cool…”

His eyes focused beyond her, and widened in sudden horror. She turned and saw that the All Father had arrived.

“Well,” came the boy’s thin voice from behind her. “That’s good, very good. I think… I think I shall pass out now.”

And when she turned back to him, surprised, she saw that indeed he had. She leaned in close, concerned, but he was still breathing, his wound still slowly bleeding. He was only a child, and had probably lost quite a bit of blood – she dug in her pouch for a healing stone.

There were footsteps behind her. “Asleep?”

She whirled about, and approximated a bow. “All-Father. I cannot explain his presence here, but he is in need of healer.”

“And so he shall have one,” said the king of Asgard. One of his ravens was at his shoulder, which was a bit unusual. Though all knew of how they served him – some even said they spoke secretly, possibly remotely to him, reporting on the doings of the world – he rarely had them so obviously attend him as he went about the palace. 

“My lord,” said Sif, bowing again. She wasn’t entirely sure what was expected of her here.

“Thor awaits you in the corridor,” said Odin. “I will tend to this one.”

Sif straightened. Thor had gone to speak with his mother, and with the mortal, and she somehow doubted he needed to speak with her at this moment. But she left Odin nonetheless, with only a single backward glance over her shoulder.

 

Before he called over a healer, Odin knelt before the boy and reached out a hand to touch his face. He did not stir, not even when Odin lightly touched his eyelid. Satisfied that he was not faking this unconsciousness, Odin stood and considered him awhile.

 _He did give me enough warning to escape,_ conceded Muginn. It was not exactly speech that his ravens exchanged with him, just as it was not exactly visions from afar that they gave him when he set them to spy. But it was a close approximation, and there had been something distressingly easy about the way the boy who called himself Serrure had spoken and lied to the Dark Elves in what Muginn had observed for him. And Odin was relatively convinced he had lied – that artefact had borne no proof of meddling, no signs of working under anyone’s power. It made the fact it had in fact been partially responsible for the destruction of that room’s spell, and the associated power disruption, all the more strange.

There were many questions here, and he was not sure most of them could be answered by this unconscious child before him. But perhaps a few could.

He called for the healer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus ends the first segment of what is planned to be a trilogy of fanfictions. Thanks for reading!


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